• Tom Lane's avatar
    Fix a low-probability crash in our qsort implementation. · 9d6077ab
    Tom Lane authored
    It's standard for quicksort implementations, after having partitioned the
    input into two subgroups, to recurse to process the smaller partition and
    then handle the larger partition by iterating.  This method guarantees
    that no more than log2(N) levels of recursion can be needed.  However,
    Bentley and McIlroy argued that checking to see which partition is smaller
    isn't worth the cycles, and so their code doesn't do that but just always
    recurses on the left partition.  In most cases that's fine; but with
    worst-case input we might need O(N) levels of recursion, and that means
    that qsort could be driven to stack overflow.  Such an overflow seems to
    be the only explanation for today's report from Yiqing Jin of a SIGSEGV
    in med3_tuple while creating an index of a couple billion entries with a
    very large maintenance_work_mem setting.  Therefore, let's spend the few
    additional cycles and lines of code needed to choose the smaller partition
    for recursion.
    
    Also, fix up the qsort code so that it properly uses size_t not int for
    some intermediate values representing numbers of items.  This would only
    be a live risk when sorting more than INT_MAX bytes (in qsort/qsort_arg)
    or tuples (in qsort_tuple), which I believe would never happen with any
    caller in the current core code --- but perhaps it could happen with
    call sites in third-party modules?  In any case, this is trouble waiting
    to happen, and the corrected code is probably if anything shorter and
    faster than before, since it removes sign-extension steps that had to
    happen when converting between int and size_t.
    
    In passing, move a couple of CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls so that it's
    not necessary to preserve the value of "r" across them, and prettify
    the output of gen_qsort_tuple.pl a little.
    
    Back-patch to all supported branches.  The odds of hitting this issue
    are probably higher in 9.4 and up than before, due to the new ability
    to allocate sort workspaces exceeding 1GB, but there's no good reason
    to believe that it's impossible to crash older branches this way.
    9d6077ab
qsort_arg.c 6.14 KB