Fix postmaster's handling of a startup-process crash.
Ordinarily, a failure (unexpected exit status) of the startup subprocess
should be considered fatal, so the postmaster should just close up shop
and quit. However, if we sent the startup process a SIGQUIT or SIGKILL
signal, the failure is hardly "unexpected", and we should attempt restart;
this is necessary for recovery from ordinary backend crashes in hot-standby
scenarios. I attempted to implement the latter rule with a two-line patch
in commit 442231d7f71764b8c628044e7ce2225f9aa43b67, but it now emerges that
that patch was a few bricks shy of a load: it failed to distinguish the
case of a signaled startup process from the case where the new startup
process crashes before reaching database consistency. That resulted in
infinitely respawning a new startup process only to have it crash again.
To handle this properly, we really must track whether we have sent the
*current* startup process a kill signal. Rather than add yet another
ad-hoc boolean to the postmaster's state, I chose to unify this with the
existing RecoveryError flag into an enum tracking the startup process's
state. That seems more consistent with the postmaster's general state
machine design.
Back-patch to 9.0, like the previous patch.
Branch
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REL9_4_STABLE
Details
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http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0d01c5b932ef2da9e5e281e2aa8541536e1ecdd1
Modified Files
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src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c | 51 +++++++++++++++++++++++++----------
1 file changed, 37 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)