Re: Server crash with older tzload library

Hi Tom,

While setting timezone using SET command (say GMT+3:30), postgres sometimes crashes randomly.
After debugging into the code, it is observed that if tzload() call fails in pg_tzset() for whatever reason, the returned value of the function then have garbage values for state variable. And this will assigned to session_timezone in assign_timezone() function later.

Now as session_timezone.state variable has garbage values, it is causing a server crash further. Unfortunately it is happening with few garbage values and not crashing the server always.

Here are the two statements used:

SET TimeZone = 'GMT+3:30';
SELECT '1969-12-31 20:30:00'::timestamptz;

After, initializing tzstate variable to zero in pg_tzset() function, server crash didn't come up again.

The upstream zoneinfo project just released a new tzcode version, 2010c. After syncing the code to this version does not lead to server crash. The new release is now initializing the tzstate variable with zeros to avoid any garbage values.

PFA, patch which will bring us up-to date to 2010c.

Note: This behavior was observed on Windows machine.

Thanks

--
Jeevan B Chalke
Software Engineer, R&D
EnterpriseDB Corporation
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