• Tom Lane's avatar
    Use unnamed POSIX semaphores, if available, on Linux and FreeBSD. · ecb0d20a
    Tom Lane authored
    We've had support for using unnamed POSIX semaphores instead of System V
    semaphores for quite some time, but it was not used by default on any
    platform.  Since many systems have rather small limits on the number of
    SysV semaphores allowed, it seems desirable to switch to POSIX semaphores
    where they're available and don't create performance or kernel resource
    problems.  Experimentation by me shows that unnamed POSIX semaphores
    are at least as good as SysV semaphores on Linux, and we previously had
    a report from Maksym Sobolyev that FreeBSD is significantly worse with
    SysV semaphores than POSIX ones.  So adjust those two platforms to use
    unnamed POSIX semaphores, if configure can find the necessary library
    functions.  If this goes well, we may switch other platforms as well,
    but it would be advisable to test them individually first.
    
    It's not currently contemplated that we'd encourage users to select
    a semaphore API for themselves, but anyone who wants to experiment
    can add PREFERRED_SEMAPHORES=UNNAMED_POSIX (or NAMED_POSIX, or SYSV)
    to their configure command line to do so.
    
    I also tweaked configure to report which API it's selected, mainly
    so that we can tell that from buildfarm reports.
    
    I did not touch the user documentation's discussion about semaphores;
    that will need some adjustment once the dust settles.
    
    Discussion: <8536.1475704230@sss.pgh.pa.us>
    ecb0d20a
configure 464 KB