Re: [HACKERS] Moving relation extension locks out of heavyweight lock manager

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 at 19:08, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 8:06 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 2020-02-19 11:12:18 +0530, Amit Kapila wrote:
> > > I think till we know the real need for changing group locking, going
> > > in the direction of what Tom suggested to use an array of LWLocks [1]
> > > to address the problems in hand is a good idea.
> >
> > -many
> >
> > I think that building yet another locking subsystem is the entirely
> > wrong idea - especially when there's imo no convincing architectural
> > reasons to do so.
> >
>
> Hmm, AFAIU, it will be done by having an array of LWLocks which we do
> at other places as well (like BufferIO locks).  I am not sure if we
> can call it as new locking subsystem, but if we decide to continue
> using lock.c and change group locking then I think we can do that as
> well, see my comments below regarding that.
>
> >
> > > It is not very clear to me that are we thinking to give up on Tom's
> > > idea [1] and change group locking even though it is not clear or at
> > > least nobody has proposed an idea/patch which requires that?  Or are
> > > we thinking that we can do what Tom suggested for relation extension
> > > lock and also plan to change group locking for future parallel
> > > operations that might require it?
> >
> > What I'm advocating is that extension locks should continue to go
> > through lock.c. And yes, that requires some changes to group locking,
> > but I still don't see why they'd be complicated.
> >
>
> Fair position, as per initial analysis, I think if we do below three
> things, it should work out without changing to a new way of locking
> for relation extension or page type locks.
> a. As per the discussion above, ensure in code we will never try to
> acquire another heavy-weight lock after acquiring relation extension
> or page type locks (probably by having Asserts in code or maybe some
> other way).

The current patch
(v02_0001-Added-assert-to-verify-that-we-never-try-to-take-any.patch)
doesn't check that acquiring a heavy-weight lock after page type lock,
is that right?

There is the path doing that: ginInsertCleanup() holds
a page lock and insert the pending list items, which might hold a
relation extension lock.