Presently, we rely on each individual signal handler to save the
initial value of errno and then restore it before returning if
needed. This is easily forgotten and, if missed, often goes
undetected for a long time.
In commit 3b00fdba9f, we introduced a wrapper signal handler
function that checks whether MyProcPid matches getpid(). This
commit moves the aforementioned errno restoration code from the
individual signal handlers to the new wrapper handler so that we no
longer need to worry about missing it.
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund, Noah Misch
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20231121212008.GA3742740%40nathanxps13
In commit 97550c0711, we added a similar check to the SIGTERM
handler for the startup process. This commit adds this check to
backend signal handlers installed with pqsignal(). This is done by
using a wrapper function that performs the check before calling the
actual handler.
The hope is that this will offer more general protection against
child processes of Postgres backends inadvertently modifying shared
memory due to inherited signal handlers. Another potential
follow-up improvement is to use this wrapper handler function to
restore errno instead of relying on each individual handler
function to do so.
This commit makes the changes in commit 97550c0711 obsolete but
leaves reverting it for a follow-up commit.
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund, Noah Misch
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20231121212008.GA3742740%40nathanxps13
Explain where pqsignal() came from, what problem it originally solved
without assuming the reader is familiar with historical Unixen, why we
still need it, what it does for us now, and the key differences in
frontend code on Windows.
Reviewed-by: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA%2BhUKG%2BRst1h3uo%2BXRgdRVnWHBa4mmj5gFbmCzZr73s-Fh_5JA%40mail.gmail.com
POSIX sigaction(2) can be told to block a set of signals while a
signal handler executes. Make use of that instead of manually
blocking and unblocking signals in the postmaster's signal handlers.
This should save a few cycles, and it also prevents recursive
invocation of signal handlers when many signals arrive in close
succession. We have seen buildfarm failures that seem to be due to
postmaster stack overflow caused by such recursion (exacerbated by
a Linux PPC64 kernel bug).
This doesn't change anything about the way that it works on Windows.
Somebody might consider adjusting port/win32/signal.c to let it work
similarly, but I'm not in a position to do that.
For the moment, just apply to HEAD. Possibly we should consider
back-patching this, but it'd be good to let it age awhile first.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/14878.1570820201@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
The postmaster keeps signals blocked everywhere except while waiting
for something to happen in ServerLoop(). The code expects that the
select(2) will be cancelled with EINTR if an interrupt occurs; without
that, followup actions that should be performed by ServerLoop() itself
will be delayed. However, some platforms interpret the SA_RESTART
signal flag as meaning that they should restart rather than cancel
the select(2). Worse yet, some of them restart it with the original
timeout delay, meaning that a steady stream of signal interrupts can
prevent ServerLoop() from iterating at all if there are no incoming
connection requests.
Observable symptoms of this, on an affected platform such as HPUX 10,
include extremely slow parallel query startup (possibly as much as
30 seconds) and failure to update timestamps on the postmaster's sockets
and lockfiles when no new connections arrive for a long time.
We can fix this by running the postmaster's signal handlers without
SA_RESTART. That would be quite a scary change if the range of code
where signals are accepted weren't so tiny, but as it is, it seems
safe enough. (Note that postmaster children do, and must, reset all
the handlers before unblocking signals; so this change should not
affect any child process.)
There is talk of rewriting the postmaster to use a WaitEventSet and
not do signal response work in signal handlers, at which point it might
be appropriate to revert this patch. But that's not happening before
v11 at the earliest.
Back-patch to 9.6. The problem exists much further back, but the
worst symptom arises only in connection with parallel query, so it
does not seem worth taking any portability risks in older branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9205.1492833041@sss.pgh.pa.us
Remove configure's checks for HAVE_POSIX_SIGNALS, HAVE_SIGPROCMASK, and
HAVE_SIGSETJMP. These APIs are required by the Single Unix Spec v2
(POSIX 1997), which we generally consider to define our minimum required
set of Unix APIs. Moreover, no buildfarm member has reported not having
them since 2012 or before, which means that even if the code is still live
somewhere, it's untested --- and we've made plenty of signal-handling
changes of late. So just take these APIs as given and save the cycles for
configure probes for them.
However, we can't remove as much C code as I'd hoped, because the Windows
port evidently still uses the non-POSIX code paths for signal masking.
Since we're largely emulating these BSD-style APIs for Windows anyway, it
might be a good thing to switch over to POSIX-like notation and thereby
remove a few more #ifdefs. But I'm not in a position to code or test that.
In the meantime, we can at least make things a bit more transparent by
testing for WIN32 explicitly in these places.
The exclusion of SIGALRM dates back to Berkeley days, when Postgres used
SIGALRM in only one very short stretch of code. Nowadays, allowing it to
interrupt kernel calls doesn't seem like a very good idea, since its use
for statement_timeout means SIGALRM could occur anyplace in the code, and
there are far too many call sites where we aren't prepared to deal with
EINTR failures. When third-party code is taken into consideration, it
seems impossible that we ever could be fully EINTR-proof, so better to
use SA_RESTART always and deal with the implications of that. One such
implication is that we should not assume pg_usleep() will be terminated
early by a signal. Therefore, long sleeps should probably be replaced
by WaitLatch operations where practical.
Back-patch to 9.3 so we can get some beta testing on this change.
I had thought we weren't using this version of pqsignal() at all on
Windows, but that's wrong --- initdb is using it (and coping with the
POSIX-ish semantics of bare signal() :-(). So allow the file to be
built in WIN32+FRONTEND case, and add it to the MSVC build logic.
We had two copies of this function in the backend and libpq, which was
already pretty bogus, but it turns out that we need it in some other
programs that don't use libpq (such as pg_test_fsync). So put it where
it probably should have been all along. The signal-mask-initialization
support in src/backend/libpq/pqsignal.c stays where it is, though, since
we only need that in the backend.
Nathan Bossart