-
Tom Lane authored
a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself from shared memory. We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go through proc_exit() instead. Also, it is reported that under Windows there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit (thank you, Microsoft). If this does happen then the system is probably hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks. So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash. The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released; these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources in a backend, or close enough anyway. This choice means there is no coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway. This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs. Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.
969d7cd4