The postmaster now checks every minute or so (worst case, at most two
minutes) that postmaster.pid is still there and still contains its own PID.
If not, it performs an immediate shutdown, as though it had received
SIGQUIT.
The original goal behind this change was to ensure that failed buildfarm
runs would get fully cleaned up, even if the test scripts had left a
postmaster running, which is not an infrequent occurrence. When the
buildfarm script removes a test postmaster's $PGDATA directory, its next
check on postmaster.pid will fail and cause it to exit. Previously, manual
intervention was often needed to get rid of such orphaned postmasters,
since they'd block new test postmasters from obtaining the expected socket
address.
However, by checking postmaster.pid and not something else, we can provide
additional robustness: manual removal of postmaster.pid is a frequent DBA
mistake, and now we can at least limit the damage that will ensue if a new
postmaster is started while the old one is still alive.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since we won't get the desired
improvement in buildfarm reliability otherwise.
Commit c9b0cbe98b accidentally broke the
order of operations during postmaster shutdown: it resulted in removing
the per-socket lockfiles after, not before, postmaster.pid. This creates
a race-condition hazard for a new postmaster that's started immediately
after observing that postmaster.pid has disappeared; if it sees the
socket lockfile still present, it will quite properly refuse to start.
This error appears to be the explanation for at least some of the
intermittent buildfarm failures we've seen in the pg_upgrade test.
Another problem, which has been there all along, is that the postmaster
has never bothered to close() its listen sockets, but has just allowed them
to close at process death. This creates a different race condition for an
incoming postmaster: it might be unable to bind to the desired listen
address because the old postmaster is still incumbent. This might explain
some odd failures we've seen in the past, too. (Note: this is not related
to the fact that individual backends don't close their client communication
sockets. That behavior is intentional and is not changed by this patch.)
Fix by adding an on_proc_exit function that closes the postmaster's ports
explicitly, and (in 9.3 and up) reshuffling the responsibility for where
to unlink the Unix socket files. Lock file unlinking can stay where it
is, but teach it to unlink the lock files in reverse order of creation.
We should set MyProc->databaseId after acquiring the per-database lock,
not beforehand. The old way risked deadlock against processes trying to
copy or delete the target database, since they would first acquire the lock
and then wait for processes with matching databaseId to exit; that left a
window wherein an incoming process could set its databaseId and then block
on the lock, while the other process had the lock and waited in vain for
the incoming process to exit.
CountOtherDBBackends() would time out and fail after 5 seconds, so this
just resulted in an unexpected failure not a permanent lockup, but it's
still annoying when it happens. A real-world example of a use-case is that
short-duration connections to a template database should not cause CREATE
DATABASE to fail.
Doing it in the other order should be fine since the contract has always
been that processes searching the ProcArray for a database ID must hold the
relevant per-database lock while searching. Thus, this actually removes
the former race condition that required an assumption that storing to
MyProc->databaseId is atomic.
It's been like this for a long time, so back-patch to all active branches.
If any error occurred while we were in the middle of reading a protocol
message from the client, we could lose sync, and incorrectly try to
interpret a part of another message as a new protocol message. That will
usually lead to an "invalid frontend message" error that terminates the
connection. However, this is a security issue because an attacker might
be able to deliberately cause an error, inject a Query message in what's
supposed to be just user data, and have the server execute it.
We were quite careful to not have CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls or other
operations that could ereport(ERROR) in the middle of processing a message,
but a query cancel interrupt or statement timeout could nevertheless cause
it to happen. Also, the V2 fastpath and COPY handling were not so careful.
It's very difficult to recover in the V2 COPY protocol, so we will just
terminate the connection on error. In practice, that's what happened
previously anyway, as we lost protocol sync.
To fix, add a new variable in pqcomm.c, PqCommReadingMsg, that is set
whenever we're in the middle of reading a message. When it's set, we cannot
safely ERROR out and continue running, because we might've read only part
of a message. PqCommReadingMsg acts somewhat similarly to critical sections
in that if an error occurs while it's set, the error handler will force the
connection to be terminated, as if the error was FATAL. It's not
implemented by promoting ERROR to FATAL in elog.c, like ERROR is promoted
to PANIC in critical sections, because we want to be able to use
PG_TRY/CATCH to recover and regain protocol sync. pq_getmessage() takes
advantage of that to prevent an OOM error from terminating the connection.
To prevent unnecessary connection terminations, add a holdoff mechanism
similar to HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS() that can be used hold off query cancel
interrupts, but still allow die interrupts. The rules on which interrupts
are processed when are now a bit more complicated, so refactor
ProcessInterrupts() and the calls to it in signal handlers so that the
signal handlers always call it if ImmediateInterruptOK is set, and
ProcessInterrupts() can decide to not do anything if the other conditions
are not met.
Reported by Emil Lenngren. Patch reviewed by Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Security: CVE-2015-0244
This was not changed in HEAD, but will be done later as part of a
pgindent run. Future pgindent runs will also do this.
Report by Tom Lane
Backpatch through all supported branches, but not HEAD
An oversight in commit e710b65c1c allowed
database names beginning with "-" to be treated as though they were secure
command-line switches; and this switch processing occurs before client
authentication, so that even an unprivileged remote attacker could exploit
the bug, needing only connectivity to the postmaster's port. Assorted
exploits for this are possible, some requiring a valid database login,
some not. The worst known problem is that the "-r" switch can be invoked
to redirect the process's stderr output, so that subsequent error messages
will be appended to any file the server can write. This can for example be
used to corrupt the server's configuration files, so that it will fail when
next restarted. Complete destruction of database tables is also possible.
Fix by keeping the database name extracted from a startup packet fully
separate from command-line switches, as had already been done with the
user name field.
The Postgres project thanks Mitsumasa Kondo for discovering this bug,
Kyotaro Horiguchi for drafting the fix, and Noah Misch for recognizing
the full extent of the danger.
Security: CVE-2013-1899
The pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() functions checked the privileges
of the initially-authenticated user rather than the current user, which is
wrong. For example, a user-defined index function could successfully call
these functions when executed by ANALYZE within autovacuum. This could
allow an attacker with valid but low-privilege database access to interfere
with creation of routine backups. Reported and fixed by Noah Misch.
Security: CVE-2013-1901
This GUC allows limiting the time spent waiting to acquire any one
heavyweight lock.
In support of this, improve the recently-added timeout infrastructure
to permit efficiently enabling or disabling multiple timeouts at once.
That reduces the performance hit from turning on lock_timeout, though
it's still not zero.
Zoltán Böszörményi, reviewed by Tom Lane,
Stephen Frost, and Hari Babu
This generalizes the existing ALTER ROLE ... SET and ALTER DATABASE
... SET functionality to allow creating settings that apply to all users
in all databases.
reviewed by Pavel Stehule
... not on auxiliary processes. I managed to overlook the fact that I
had disabled assertions on my HEAD checkout long ago.
Hopefully this will turn the buildfarm green again, and put an end to
today's silliness.
Commit da07a1e8 was broken for EXEC_BACKEND because I failed to realize
that the MaxBackends recomputation needed to be duplicated by
subprocesses in SubPostmasterMain. However, instead of having the value
be recomputed at all, it's better to assign the correct value at
postmaster initialization time, and have it be propagated to exec'ed
backends via BackendParameters.
MaxBackends stays as zero until after modules in
shared_preload_libraries have had a chance to register bgworkers, since
the value is going to be untrustworthy till that's finished.
Heikki Linnakangas and Álvaro Herrera
We failed to ever fill the sixth line (LISTEN_ADDR), which caused the
attempt to fill the seventh line (SHMEM_KEY) to fail, so that the shared
memory key never got added to the file in standalone mode. This has been
broken since we added more content to our lock files in 9.1.
To fix, tweak the logic in CreateLockFile to add an empty LISTEN_ADDR
line in standalone mode. This is a tad grotty, but since that function
already knows almost everything there is to know about the contents of
lock files, it doesn't seem that it's any better to hack it elsewhere.
It's not clear how significant this bug really is, since a standalone
backend should never have any children and thus it seems not critical
to be able to check the nattch count of the shmem segment externally.
But I'm going to back-patch the fix anyway.
This problem had escaped notice because of an ancient (and in hindsight
pretty dubious) decision to suppress LOG-level messages by default in
standalone mode; so that the elog(LOG) complaint in AddToDataDirLockFile
that should have warned of the problem didn't do anything. Fixing that
is material for a separate patch though.
Background workers are postmaster subprocesses that run arbitrary
user-specified code. They can request shared memory access as well as
backend database connections; or they can just use plain libpq frontend
database connections.
Modules listed in shared_preload_libraries can register background
workers in their _PG_init() function; this is early enough that it's not
necessary to provide an extra GUC option, because the necessary extra
resources can be allocated early on. Modules can install more than one
bgworker, if necessary.
Care is taken that these extra processes do not interfere with other
postmaster tasks: only one such process is started on each ServerLoop
iteration. This means a large number of them could be waiting to be
started up and postmaster is still able to quickly service external
connection requests. Also, shutdown sequence should not be impacted by
a worker process that's reasonably well behaved (i.e. promptly responds
to termination signals.)
The current implementation lets worker processes specify their start
time, i.e. at what point in the server startup process they are to be
started: right after postmaster start (in which case they mustn't ask
for shared memory access), when consistent state has been reached
(useful during recovery in a HOT standby server), or when recovery has
terminated (i.e. when normal backends are allowed).
In case of a bgworker crash, actions to take depend on registration
data: if shared memory was requested, then all other connections are
taken down (as well as other bgworkers), just like it were a regular
backend crashing. The bgworker itself is restarted, too, within a
configurable timeframe (which can be configured to be never).
More features to add to this framework can be imagined without much
effort, and have been discussed, but this seems good enough as a useful
unit already.
An elementary sample module is supplied.
Author: Álvaro Herrera
This patch is loosely based on prior patches submitted by KaiGai Kohei,
and unsubmitted code by Simon Riggs.
Reviewed by: KaiGai Kohei, Markus Wanner, Andres Freund,
Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, Amit Kapila
Similar changes were done to pg_hba.conf earlier already, this commit makes
pg_ident.conf to behave the same as pg_hba.conf.
This has two user-visible effects. First, if pg_ident.conf contains multiple
errors, the whole file is parsed at postmaster startup time and all the
errors are immediately reported. Before this patch, the file was parsed and
the errors were reported only when someone tries to connect using an
authentication method that uses the file, and the parsing stopped on first
error. Second, if you SIGHUP to reload the config files, and the new
pg_ident.conf file contains an error, the error is logged but the old file
stays in effect.
Also, regular expressions in pg_ident.conf are now compiled only once when
the file is loaded, rather than every time the a user is authenticated. That
should speed up authentication if you have a lot of regexps in the file.
Amit Kapila
This reduces unnecessary exposure of other headers through htup.h, which
is very widely included by many files.
I have chosen to move the function prototypes to the new file as well,
because that means htup.h no longer needs to include tupdesc.h. In
itself this doesn't have much effect in indirect inclusion of tupdesc.h
throughout the tree, because it's also required by execnodes.h; but it's
something to explore in the future, and it seemed best to do the htup.h
change now while I'm busy with it.
The GUC check hooks for transaction_read_only and transaction_isolation
tried to check RecoveryInProgress(), so as to disallow setting read/write
mode or serializable isolation level (respectively) in hot standby
sessions. However, GUC check hooks can be called in many situations where
we're not connected to shared memory at all, resulting in a crash in
RecoveryInProgress(). Among other cases, this results in EXEC_BACKEND
builds crashing during child process start if default_transaction_isolation
is serializable, as reported by Heikki Linnakangas. Protect those calls
by silently allowing any setting when not inside a transaction; which is
okay anyway since these GUCs are always reset at start of transaction.
Also, add a check to GetSerializableTransactionSnapshot() to complain
if we are in hot standby. We need that check despite the one in
check_XactIsoLevel() because default_transaction_isolation could be
serializable. We don't want to complain any sooner than this in such
cases, since that would prevent running transactions at all in such a
state; but a transaction can be run, if SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION is done
before setting a snapshot. Per report some months ago from Robert Haas.
Back-patch to 9.1, since these problems were introduced by the SSI patch.
Kevin Grittner and Tom Lane, with ideas from Heikki Linnakangas
Replace unix_socket_directory with unix_socket_directories, which is a list
of socket directories, and adjust postmaster's code to allow zero or more
Unix-domain sockets to be created.
This is mostly a straightforward change, but since the Unix sockets ought
to be created after the TCP/IP sockets for safety reasons (better chance
of detecting a port number conflict), AddToDataDirLockFile needs to be
fixed to support out-of-order updates of data directory lockfile lines.
That's a change that had been foreseen to be necessary someday anyway.
Honza Horak, reviewed and revised by Tom Lane
Management of timeouts was getting a little cumbersome; what we
originally had was more than enough back when we were only concerned
about deadlocks and query cancel; however, when we added timeouts for
standby processes, the code got considerably messier. Since there are
plans to add more complex timeouts, this seems a good time to introduce
a central timeout handling module.
External modules register their timeout handlers during process
initialization, and later enable and disable them as they see fit using
a simple API; timeout.c is in charge of keeping track of which timeouts
are in effect at any time, installing a common SIGALRM signal handler,
and calling setitimer() as appropriate to ensure timely firing of
external handlers.
timeout.c additionally supports pluggable modules to add their own
timeouts, though this capability isn't exercised anywhere yet.
Additionally, as of this commit, walsender processes are aware of
timeouts; we had a preexisting bug there that made those ignore SIGALRM,
thus being subject to unhandled deadlocks, particularly during the
authentication phase. This has already been fixed in back branches in
commit 0bf8eb2a, which see for more details.
Main author: Zoltán Böszörményi
Some review and cleanup by Álvaro Herrera
Extensive reworking by Tom Lane
The accurate info about what's in a lock file has been in miscadmin.h
for some time, so let's just make this comment point there instead of
maintaining a duplicative copy.
superuser doesn't have doesn't make much sense, as a superuser can do
whatever he wants through other means, anyway. So instead of granting
replication privilege to superusers in CREATE USER time by default, allow
replication connection from superusers whether or not they have the
replication privilege.
Patch by Noah Misch, per discussion on bug report #6264
lost. The only way we detect that at the moment is when write() fails when
we try to write to the socket.
Florian Pflug with small changes by me, reviewed by Greg Jaskiewicz.
This adds some I/O stats to the logging of autovacuum (when the
operation takes long enough that log_autovacuum_min_duration causes it
to be logged), so that it is easier to tune. Notably, it adds buffer
I/O counts (hits, misses, dirtied) and read and write rate.
Authors: Greg Smith and Noah Misch
The statement start timestamp was not set before initiating the transaction
that is used to look up client authentication information in pg_authid.
In consequence, enable_sig_alarm computed a wrong value (far in the past)
for statement_fin_time. That didn't have any immediate effect, because the
timeout alarm was set without reference to statement_fin_time; but if we
subsequently blocked on a lock for a short time, CheckStatementTimeout
would consult the bogus value when we cancelled the lock timeout wait,
and then conclude we'd timed out, leading to immediate failure of the
connection attempt. Thus an innocent "vacuum full pg_authid" would cause
failures of concurrent connection attempts. Noted while testing other,
more serious consequences of vacuum full on system catalogs.
We should set the statement timestamp before StartTransactionCommand(),
so that the transaction start timestamp is also valid. I'm not sure if
there are any non-cosmetic effects of it not being valid, but the xact
timestamp is at least sent to the statistics machinery.
Back-patch to 9.0. Before that, the client authentication timeout was done
outside any transaction and did not depend on this state to be valid.
Failure to distinguish these cases is the real cause behind the recent
reports of Windows builds crashing on 'infinity'::timestamp, which was
directly due to failure to establish a value of timezone_abbreviations
in postmaster child processes. The postmaster had the desired value,
but write_one_nondefault_variable() didn't transmit it to backends.
To fix that, invent a new value PGC_S_DYNAMIC_DEFAULT, and be sure to use
that or PGC_S_ENV_VAR (as appropriate) for "default" settings that are
computed during initialization. (We need both because there's at least
one variable that could receive a value from either source.)
This commit also fixes ProcessConfigFile's failure to restore the correct
default value for certain GUC variables if they are set in postgresql.conf
and then removed/commented out of the file. We have to recompute and
reinstall the value for any GUC variable that could have received a value
from PGC_S_DYNAMIC_DEFAULT or PGC_S_ENV_VAR sources, and there were a
number of oversights. (That whole thing is a crock that needs to be
redesigned, but not today.)
However, I intentionally didn't make it work "exactly right" for the cases
of timezone and log_timezone. The exactly right behavior would involve
running select_default_timezone, which we'd have to do independently in
each postgres process, causing the whole database to become entirely
unresponsive for as much as several seconds. That didn't seem like a good
idea, especially since the variable's removal from postgresql.conf might be
just an accidental edit. Instead the behavior is to adopt the previously
active setting as if it were default.
Note that this patch creates an ABI break for extensions that use any of
the PGC_S_XXX constants; they'll need to be recompiled.
This option turns off autovacuum, prevents non-super-user connections,
and enables oid setting hooks in the backend. The code continues to use
the old autoavacuum disable settings for servers with earlier catalog
versions.
This includes a catalog version bump to identify servers that support
the -b option.
Fix broken test for pre-existing postmaster, caused by wrong code for
appending lines to the lockfile; don't write a failed listen_address
setting into the lockfile; don't arbitrarily change the location of the
data directory in the lockfile compared to previous releases; provide more
consistent and useful definitions of the socket path and listen_address
entries; avoid assuming that pg_ctl has the same DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR as
the postmaster; assorted code style improvements.
This privilege is required to do Streaming Replication, instead of
superuser, making it possible to set up a SR slave that doesn't
have write permissions on the master.
Superuser privileges do NOT override this check, so in order to
use the default superuser account for replication it must be
explicitly granted the REPLICATION permissions. This is backwards
incompatible change, in the interest of higher default security.
