There was a wild mix of calling conventions: Some were declared to
return void and didn't return, some returned an int exit code, some
claimed to return an exit code, which the callers checked, but
actually never returned, and so on.
Now all of these functions are declared to return void and decorated
with attribute noreturn and don't return. That's easiest, and most
code already worked that way.
and fsync WAL at convenient intervals. For the moment it just tries to
offload this work from backends, but soon it will be responsible for
guaranteeing a maximum delay before asynchronously-committed transactions
will be flushed to disk.
This is a portion of Simon Riggs' async-commit patch, committed to CVS
separately because a background WAL writer seems like it might be a good idea
independently of the async-commit feature. I rebased walwriter.c on
bgwriter.c because it seemed like a more appropriate way of handling signals;
while the startup/shutdown logic in postmaster.c is more like autovac because
we want walwriter to quit before we start the shutdown checkpoint.
