Ordinarily, a failure (unexpected exit status) of the startup subprocess
should be considered fatal, so the postmaster should just close up shop
and quit. However, if we sent the startup process a SIGQUIT or SIGKILL
signal, the failure is hardly "unexpected", and we should attempt restart;
this is necessary for recovery from ordinary backend crashes in hot-standby
scenarios. I attempted to implement the latter rule with a two-line patch
in commit 442231d7f7, but it now emerges that
that patch was a few bricks shy of a load: it failed to distinguish the
case of a signaled startup process from the case where the new startup
process crashes before reaching database consistency. That resulted in
infinitely respawning a new startup process only to have it crash again.
To handle this properly, we really must track whether we have sent the
*current* startup process a kill signal. Rather than add yet another
ad-hoc boolean to the postmaster's state, I chose to unify this with the
existing RecoveryError flag into an enum tracking the startup process's
state. That seems more consistent with the postmaster's general state
machine design.
Back-patch to 9.0, like the previous patch.
Reentering this function with the right timing caused a double free,
typically crashing the backend. By synchronizing a disconnection with
the authentication timeout, an unauthenticated attacker could achieve
this somewhat consistently. Call be_tls_close() solely from within
proc_exit_prepare(). Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions).
Benkocs Norbert Attila
Security: CVE-2015-3165
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
Commit b94ce6e80 reordered postmaster's startup sequence so that the
tempfile directory is only cleaned up after all the necessary state
for pg_ctl is collected. Unfortunately the chosen location is after
the syslogger has been started; which normally is fine, except for
!WIN32 EXEC_BACKEND builds, which pass information to children via
files in the temp directory.
Move the call to RemovePgTempFiles() to just before the syslogger has
started. That's the first child we fork.
Luckily EXEC_BACKEND is pretty much only used by endusers on windows,
which has a separate method to pass information to children. That
means the real world impact of this bug is very small.
Discussion: 20150113182344.GF12272@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch to 9.1, just as the previous commit was.
Darwin --enable-nls builds use a substitute setlocale() that may start a
thread. Buildfarm member orangutan experienced BackendList corruption
on account of different postmaster threads executing signal handlers
simultaneously. Furthermore, a multithreaded postmaster risks undefined
behavior from sigprocmask() and fork(). Emit LOG messages about the
problem and its workaround. Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions).
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
Previously, in some places, socket creation errors were checked for
negative values, which is not true for Windows because sockets are
unsigned. This masked socket creation errors on Windows.
Backpatch through 9.0. 8.4 doesn't have the infrastructure to fix this.
Formerly, we set up the postmaster's signal handling only when we were
about to start launching subprocesses. This is a bad idea though, as
it means that for example a SIGINT arriving before that will kill the
postmaster instantly, perhaps leaving lockfiles, socket files, shared
memory, etc laying about. We'd rather that such a signal caused orderly
postmaster termination including releasing of those resources. A simple
fix is to move the PostmasterMain stanza that initializes signal handling
to an earlier point, before we've created any such resources. Then, an
early-arriving signal will be blocked until we're ready to deal with it
in the usual way. (The only part that really needs to be moved up is
blocking of signals, but it seems best to keep the signal handler
installation calls together with that; for one thing this ensures the
kernel won't drop any signals we wished to get. The handlers won't get
invoked in any case until we unblock signals in ServerLoop.)
Per a report from MauMau. He proposed changing the way "pg_ctl stop"
works to deal with this, but that'd just be masking one symptom not
fixing the core issue.
It's been like this since forever, so back-patch to all supported branches.
The code for matching clients to pg_hba.conf lines that specify host names
(instead of IP address ranges) failed to complain if reverse DNS lookup
failed; instead it silently didn't match, so that you might end up getting
a surprising "no pg_hba.conf entry for ..." error, as seen in bug #9518
from Mike Blackwell. Since we don't want to make this a fatal error in
situations where pg_hba.conf contains a mixture of host names and IP
addresses (clients matching one of the numeric entries should not have to
have rDNS data), remember the lookup failure and mention it as DETAIL if
we get to "no pg_hba.conf entry". Apply the same approach to forward-DNS
lookup failures, too, rather than treating them as immediate hard errors.
Along the way, fix a couple of bugs that prevented us from detecting an
rDNS lookup error reliably, and make sure that we make only one rDNS lookup
attempt; formerly, if the lookup attempt failed, the code would try again
for each host name entry in pg_hba.conf. Since more or less the whole
point of this design is to ensure there's only one lookup attempt not one
per entry, the latter point represents a performance bug that seems
sufficient justification for back-patching.
Also, adjust src/port/getaddrinfo.c so that it plays as well as it can
with this code. Which is not all that well, since it does not have actual
support for rDNS lookup, but at least it should return the expected (and
required by spec) error codes so that the main code correctly perceives the
lack of functionality as a lookup failure. It's unlikely that PG is still
being used in production on any machines that require our getaddrinfo.c,
so I'm not excited about working harder than this.
To keep the code in the various branches similar, this includes
back-patching commits c424d0d105 and
1997f34db4 into 9.2 and earlier.
Back-patch to 9.1 where the facility for hostnames in pg_hba.conf was
introduced.
Per reports from Andres Freund and Luke Campbell, a server failure during
set_pglocale_pgservice results in a segfault rather than a useful error
message, because the infrastructure needed to use ereport hasn't been
initialized; specifically, MemoryContextInit hasn't been called.
One known cause of this is starting the server in a directory it
doesn't have permission to read.
We could try to prevent set_pglocale_pgservice from using anything that
depends on palloc or elog, but that would be messy, and the odds of future
breakage seem high. Moreover there are other things being called in main.c
that look likely to use palloc or elog too --- perhaps those things
shouldn't be there, but they are there today. The best solution seems to
be to move the call of MemoryContextInit to very early in the backend's
real main() function. I've verified that an elog or ereport occurring
immediately after that is now capable of sending something useful to
stderr.
I also added code to elog.c to print something intelligible rather than
just crashing if MemoryContextInit hasn't created the ErrorContext.
This could happen if MemoryContextInit itself fails (due to malloc
failure), and provides some future-proofing against someone trying to
sneak in new code even earlier in server startup.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Since we've only heard reports of
this type of failure recently, it may be that some recent change has made
it more likely to see a crash of this kind; but it sure looks like it's
broken all the way back.
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
Once we've received a shutdown signal (SIGINT or SIGTERM), we should not
launch any more child processes, even if we get signals requesting such.
The normal code path for spawning backends has always understood that,
but the postmaster's infrastructure for hot standby and autovacuum didn't
get the memo. As reported by Hari Babu in bug #7643, this could lead to
failure to shut down at all in some cases, such as when SIGINT is received
just before the startup process sends PMSIGNAL_RECOVERY_STARTED: we'd
launch a bgwriter and checkpointer, and then those processes would have no
idea that they ought to quit. Similarly, launching a new autovacuum worker
would result in waiting till it finished before shutting down.
Also, switch the order of the code blocks in reaper() that detect startup
process crash versus shutdown termination. Once we've sent it a signal,
we should not consider that exit(1) is surprising. This is just a cosmetic
fix since shutdown occurs correctly anyway, but better not to log a phony
complaint about startup process crash.
Back-patch to 9.0. Some parts of this might be applicable before that,
but given the lack of prior complaints I'm not going to worry too much
about older branches.
Should be limited to the maximum number of connections excluding
autovacuum workers, not including.
Add similar check for max_wal_senders, which should never be higher than
max_connections.
In the original coding of the log rotation stuff, we did not bother to make
the truncation logic work for the very first rotation after postmaster
start (or after a syslogger crash and restart). It just always appended
in that case. It did not seem terribly important at the time, but we've
recently had two separate complaints from people who expected it to work
unsurprisingly. (Both users tend to restart the postmaster about as often
as a log rotation is configured to happen, which is maybe not typical use,
but still...) Since the initial log file is opened in the postmaster,
fixing this requires passing down some more state to the syslogger child
process.
It's always been like this, so back-patch to all supported branches.
There is no reason to do this as early as possible in postmaster startup,
and good reason not to do it until we have completely created the
postmaster's lock file, namely that it might contribute to pg_ctl thinking
that postmaster startup has timed out. (This would require a rather
unusual amount of time to be spent scanning temp file directories, but we
have at least one field report of it happening reproducibly.)
Back-patch to 9.1. Before that, pg_ctl didn't wait for additional info to
be added to the lock file, so it wasn't a problem.
Note that this is not a complete fix to the slow-start issue in 9.1,
because we still had identify_system_timezone being run during postmaster
start in 9.1. But that's at least a reasonably well-defined delay, with
an easy workaround if needed, whereas the temp-files scan is not so
predictable and cannot be avoided.
We used to only initialize the stack base pointer when starting up a regular
backend, not in other processes. In particular, autovacuum workers can run
arbitrary user code, and without stack-depth checking, infinite recursion
in e.g an index expression will bring down the whole cluster.
The comment about PL/Java using set_stack_base() is not yet true. As the
code stands, PL/java still modifies the stack_base_ptr variable directly.
However, it's been discussed in the PL/Java mailing list that it should be
changed to use the function, because PL/Java is currently oblivious to the
register stack used on Itanium. There's another issues with PL/Java, namely
that the stack base pointer it sets is not really the base of the stack, it
could be something close to the bottom of the stack. That's a separate issue
that might need some further changes to this code, but that's a different
story.
Backpatch to all supported releases.
Postmaster sets max_safe_fds by testing how many open file descriptors it
can open, and that is normally inherited by all child processes at fork().
Not so on EXEC_BACKEND, ie. Windows, however. Because of that, we
effectively ignored max_files_per_process on Windows, and always assumed
a conservative default of 32 simultaneous open files. That could have an
impact on performance, if you need to access a lot of different files
in a query. After this patch, the value is passed to child processes by
save/restore_backend_variables() among many other global variables.
It has been like this forever, but given the lack of complaints about it,
I'm not backpatching this.
The postmaster was coded to treat any unexpected exit of the startup
process (i.e., the WAL replay process) as a catastrophic crash, and not try
to restart it. This was OK so long as the startup process could not have
any sibling postmaster children. However, if a hot-standby backend
crashes, we SIGQUIT the startup process along with everything else, and the
resulting exit is hardly "unexpected". Treating it as such meant we failed
to restart a standby server after any child crash at all, not only a crash
of the WAL replay process as intended. Adjust that. Back-patch to 9.0
where hot standby was introduced.
Base backup follows recommended procedure, plus goes to great
lengths to ensure that partial page writes are avoided.
Jun Ishizuka and Fujii Masao, with minor modifications
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
bgwriter is now a much less important process, responsible for page
cleaning duties only. checkpointer is now responsible for checkpoints
and so has a key role in shutdown. Later patches will correct doc
references to the now old idea that bgwriter performs checkpoints.
Has beneficial effect on performance at high write rates, but mainly
refactoring to more easily allow changes for power reduction by
simplifying previously tortuous code around required to allow page
cleaning and checkpointing to time slice in the same process.
Patch by me, Review by Dickson Guedes
Avoid possibly dumping core when pgstat_track_activity_query_size has a
less-than-default value; avoid uselessly searching for the query string
of a successfully-exited backend; don't bother putting out an ERRDETAIL if
we don't have a query to show; some other minor stylistic improvements.
To avoid minimize risk inside the postmaster, we subject this feature
to a number of significant limitations. We very much wish to avoid
doing any complex processing inside the postmaster, due to the
posssibility that the crashed backend has completely corrupted shared
memory. To that end, no encoding conversion is done; instead, we just
replace anything that doesn't look like an ASCII character with a
question mark. We limit the amount of data copied to 1024 characters,
and carefully sanity check the source of that data. While these
restrictions would doubtless be unacceptable in a general-purpose
logging facility, even this limited facility seems like an improvement
over the status quo ante.
Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by PDXPUG and myself
We were doing some amazingly complicated things in order to avoid running
the very expensive identify_system_timezone() procedure during GUC
initialization. But there is an obvious fix for that, which is to do it
once during initdb and have initdb install the system-specific default into
postgresql.conf, as it already does for most other GUC variables that need
system-environment-dependent defaults. This means that the timezone (and
log_timezone) settings no longer have any magic behavior in the server.
Per discussion.
Adds additional test for active walsenders and closes a race
condition for when we failover when a new walsender was connecting.
Reported and fixed bu Fujii Masao. Review by Heikki Linnakangas
Standby servers can now have WALSender processes, which can work with
either WALReceiver or archive_commands to pass data. Fully updated
docs, including new conceptual terms of sending server, upstream and
downstream servers. WALSenders terminated when promote to master.
Fujii Masao, review, rework and doc rewrite by Simon Riggs
When an AccessShareLock, RowShareLock, or RowExclusiveLock is requested
on an unshared database relation, and we can verify that no conflicting
locks can possibly be present, record the lock in a per-backend queue,
stored within the PGPROC, rather than in the primary lock table. This
eliminates a great deal of contention on the lock manager LWLocks.
This patch also refactors the interface between GetLockStatusData() and
pg_lock_status() to be a bit more abstract, so that we don't rely so
heavily on the lock manager's internal representation details. The new
fast path lock structures don't have a LOCK or PROCLOCK structure to
return, so we mustn't depend on that for purposes of listing outstanding
locks.
Review by Jeff Davis.
detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open,
so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently
be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling
loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all
the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that.
This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a
bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout,
postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable.
The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method
previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died,
but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe
returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return
true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie).
Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise
WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while
PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to
busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state.
Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and
Florian Pflug.
postmaster.log", or nohup.
There was a small issue with LINUX_OOM_ADJ and silent_mode, namely that with
silent_mode the postmaster process incorrectly used the OOM settings meant
for backend processes. We certainly could've fixed that directly, but since
silent_mode was redundant anyway, we might as well just remove it.
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.
If a smart shutdown occurs just as a child is starting up, and the
child subsequently becomes a walsender, there is a race condition:
the postmaster might count the exstant backends, determine that there
is one normal backend, and wait for it to die off. Had the walsender
transition already occurred before the postmaster counted, it would
have proceeded with the shutdown.
To fix this, have each child that transforms into a walsender kick
the postmaster just after doing so, so that the state machine is
certain to advance.
Fujii Masao
This is no longer necessary, and might result in a situation where the
configuration file is reloaded (and everything seems OK) but a subsequent
restart of the database fails.
Per an observation from Fujii Masao.
