Fix race condition in predicate-lock init code in EXEC_BACKEND builds.
Trading a little too heavily on letting the code path be the same whether
we were creating shared data structures or only attaching to them,
InitPredicateLocks() inserted the "scratch" PredicateLockTargetHash entry
unconditionally. This is just wrong if we're in a postmaster child,
which would only reach this code in EXEC_BACKEND builds. Most of the
time, the hash_search(HASH_ENTER) call would simply report that the
entry already existed, causing no visible effect since the code did not
bother to check for that possibility. However, if this happened while
some other backend had transiently removed the "scratch" entry, then
that other backend's eventual RestoreScratchTarget would suffer an
assert failure; this appears to be the explanation for a recent failure
on buildfarm member culicidae. In non-assert builds, there would be
no visible consequences there either. But nonetheless this is a pretty
bad bug for EXEC_BACKEND builds, for two reasons:
1. Each new backend would perform the hash_search(HASH_ENTER) call
without holding any lock that would prevent concurrent access to the
PredicateLockTargetHash hash table. This creates a low but certainly
nonzero risk of corruption of that hash table.
2. In the event that the race condition occurred, by reinserting the
scratch entry too soon, we were defeating the entire purpose of the
scratch entry, namely to guarantee that transaction commit could move
hash table entries around with no risk of out-of-memory failure.
The odds of an actual OOM failure are quite low, but not zero, and if
it did happen it would again result in corruption of the hash table.
The user-visible symptoms of such corruption are a little hard to predict,
but would presumably amount to misbehavior of SERIALIZABLE transactions
that'd require a crash or postmaster restart to fix.
To fix, just skip the hash insertion if IsUnderPostmaster. I also
inserted a bunch of assertions that the expected things happen
depending on whether IsUnderPostmaster is true. That might be overkill,
since most comparable code in other functions isn't quite that paranoid,
but once burnt twice shy.
In passing, also move a couple of lines to places where they seemed
to make more sense.
Diagnosis of problem by Thomas Munro, patch by me. Back-patch to
all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/10593.1500670709@sss.pgh.pa.us
Branch
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REL9_5_STABLE
Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5146ca3525a8449b75513e1488ee02b67529abc7
Modified Files
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src/backend/storage/lmgr/predicate.c | 29 +++++++++++++++++++++--------
1 file changed, 21 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)