socket lockfile) when writing them. The lack of an fsync here may well
explain two different reports we've seen of corrupted lockfile contents,
which doesn't particularly bother the running server but can prevent a
new server from starting if the old one crashes. Per suggestion from
Alvaro.
Back-patch to all supported versions.
an allegedly immutable index function. It was previously recognized that
we had to prevent such a function from executing SET/RESET ROLE/SESSION
AUTHORIZATION, or it could trivially obtain the privileges of the session
user. However, since there is in general no privilege checking for changes
of session-local state, it is also possible for such a function to change
settings in a way that might subvert later operations in the same session.
Examples include changing search_path to cause an unexpected function to
be called, or replacing an existing prepared statement with another one
that will execute a function of the attacker's choosing.
The present patch secures VACUUM, ANALYZE, and CREATE INDEX/REINDEX against
these threats, which are the same places previously deemed to need protection
against the SET ROLE issue. GUC changes are still allowed, since there are
many useful cases for that, but we prevent security problems by forcing a
rollback of any GUC change after completing the operation. Other cases are
handled by throwing an error if any change is attempted; these include temp
table creation, closing a cursor, and creating or deleting a prepared
statement. (In 7.4, the infrastructure to roll back GUC changes doesn't
exist, so we settle for rejecting changes of "search_path" in these contexts.)
Original report and patch by Gurjeet Singh, additional analysis by
Tom Lane.
Security: CVE-2009-4136
GetOldestXmin() instead of RecentGlobalXmin; this is safer because we do not
depend on the latter being correctly set elsewhere, and while it is more
expensive, this code path is not performance-critical. This is a real
risk for autovacuum, because it can execute whole cycles without doing
a single vacuum, which would mean that RecentGlobalXmin would stay at its
initialization value, FirstNormalTransactionId, causing a bogus value to be
inserted in pg_database. This bug could explain some recent reports of
failure to truncate pg_clog.
At the same time, change the initialization of RecentGlobalXmin to
InvalidTransactionId, and ensure that it's set to something else whenever
it's going to be used. Using it as FirstNormalTransactionId in HOT page
pruning could incur in data loss. InitPostgres takes care of setting it
to a valid value, but the extra checks are there to prevent "special"
backends from behaving in unusual ways.
Per Tom Lane's detailed problem dissection in 29544.1221061979@sss.pgh.pa.us
and CLUSTER) execute as the table owner rather than the calling user, using
the same privilege-switching mechanism already used for SECURITY DEFINER
functions. The purpose of this change is to ensure that user-defined
functions used in index definitions cannot acquire the privileges of a
superuser account that is performing routine maintenance. While a function
used in an index is supposed to be IMMUTABLE and thus not able to do anything
very interesting, there are several easy ways around that restriction; and
even if we could plug them all, there would remain a risk of reading sensitive
information and broadcasting it through a covert channel such as CPU usage.
To prevent bypassing this security measure, execution of SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION and SET ROLE is now forbidden within a SECURITY DEFINER context.
Thanks to Itagaki Takahiro for reporting this vulnerability.
Security: CVE-2007-6600
coding this was seen as useless, but the problem with not including them
is that the error message will often be something about authentication
failure, rather than the more helpful one about 'role is not permitted
to log in'. Per discussion.
transaction, unless rolled back or overridden by a SET clause for the same
variable attached to a surrounding function call. Per discussion, these
seem the best semantics. Note that this is an INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: in 8.0
through 8.2, SET LOCAL's effects disappeared at subtransaction commit
(leading to behavior that made little sense at the SQL level).
I took advantage of the opportunity to rewrite and simplify the GUC variable
save/restore logic a little bit. The old idea of a "tentative" value is gone;
it was a hangover from before we had a stack. Also, we no longer need a stack
entry for every nesting level, but only for those in which a variable's value
actually changed.
There are still some loose ends: I didn't do anything about the SET FROM
CURRENT idea yet, and it's not real clear whether we are happy with the
interaction of SET LOCAL with function-local settings. The documentation
is a bit spartan, too.
so that we will be able to create a cookie for all processes for CSVlogs.
It is set wherever MyProcPid is set. Take the opportunity to remove the now
unnecessary session-only restriction on the %s and %c escapes in log_line_prefix.
before reporting a transaction committed. Data consistency is still
guaranteed (unlike setting fsync = off), but a crash may lose the effects
of the last few transactions. Patch by Simon, some editorialization by Tom.
or abort within a backend; rearrange InitPostgres processing to make it so.
Revealed by just-added Asserts along with ECPG regression tests (hm, I wonder
why the core regression tests didn't expose it?). This possibly is another
reason for missing stats updates ...
processes to be running simultaneously. Also, now autovacuum processes do not
count towards the max_connections limit; they are counted separately from
regular processes, and are limited by the new GUC variable
autovacuum_max_workers.
The launcher now has intelligence to launch workers on each database every
autovacuum_naptime seconds, limited only on the max amount of worker slots
available.
Also, the global worker I/O utilization is limited by the vacuum cost-based
delay feature. Workers are "balanced" so that the total I/O consumption does
not exceed the established limit. This part of the patch was contributed by
ITAGAKI Takahiro.
Per discussion.
This commit breaks any code that assumes that the mere act of forming a tuple
(without writing it to disk) does not "toast" any fields. While all available
regression tests pass, I'm not totally sure that we've fixed every nook and
cranny, especially in contrib.
Greg Stark with some help from Tom Lane
module and teach PREPARE and protocol-level prepared statements to use it.
In service of this, rearrange utility-statement processing so that parse
analysis does not assume table schemas can't change before execution for
utility statements (necessary because we don't attempt to re-acquire locks
for utility statements when reusing a stored plan). This requires some
refactoring of the ProcessUtility API, but it ends up cleaner anyway,
for instance we can get rid of the QueryContext global.
Still to do: fix up SPI and related code to use the plan cache; I'm tempted to
try to make SQL functions use it too. Also, there are at least some aspects
of system state that we want to ensure remain the same during a replan as in
the original processing; search_path certainly ought to behave that way for
instance, and perhaps there are others.
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to postmaster.
The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for future improvements,
like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running in parallel.
For now, the code keeps the original behavior of having a single autovac
process at any time by sleeping until the previous worker has finished.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
stale relcache init files (pg_internal.init), and there is no mechanism for
updating them during WAL replay. Easiest solution is just to delete the init
files at conclusion of startup, and let the first backend started in each
database take care of rebuilding the init file. Simon Riggs and Tom Lane.
Back-patched to 8.1. Arguably this should be fixed in 8.0 too, but it would
require significantly more code since 8.0 has no handy startup-time scan of
pg_database to piggyback on. Manual solution of the problem is possible
in 8.0 (just delete the pg_internal.init files before starting WAL replay),
so that may be a sufficient answer.
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
contrib functionality. Along the way, remove the USER_LOCKS configuration
symbol, since it no longer makes any sense to try to compile that out.
No user documentation yet ... mmoncure has promised to write some.
Thanks to Abhijit Menon-Sen for creating a first draft to work from.
such as debugging and performance measurement. This consists of two features:
a table of "rendezvous variables" that allows separately-loaded shared
libraries to communicate, and a new GUC setting "local_preload_libraries"
that allows libraries to be loaded into specific sessions without explicit
cooperation from the client application. To make local_preload_libraries
as flexible as possible, we do not restrict its use to superusers; instead,
it is restricted to load only libraries stored in $libdir/plugins/. The
existing LOAD command has also been modified to allow non-superusers to
LOAD libraries stored in this directory.
This patch also renames the existing GUC variable preload_libraries to
shared_preload_libraries (after a suggestion by Simon Riggs) and does some
code refactoring in dfmgr.c to improve clarity.
Korry Douglas, with a little help from Tom Lane.
loaded libraries: call functions _PG_init() and _PG_fini() if the library
defines such symbols. Hence we no longer need to specify an initialization
function in preload_libraries: we can assume that the library used the
_PG_init() convention, instead. This removes one source of pilot error
in use of preloaded libraries. Original patch by Ralf Engelschall,
preload_libraries changes by me.
To this end, add a couple of columns to pg_class, relminxid and relvacuumxid,
based on which we calculate the pg_database columns after each vacuum.
We now force all databases to be vacuumed, even template ones. A backend
noticing too old a database (meaning pg_database.datminxid is in danger of
falling behind Xid wraparound) will signal the postmaster, which in turn will
start an autovacuum iteration to process the offending database. In principle
this is only there to cope with frozen (non-connectable) databases without
forcing users to set them to connectable, but it could force regular user
database to go through a database-wide vacuum at any time. Maybe we should
warn users about this somehow. Of course the real solution will be to use
autovacuum all the time ;-)
There are some additional improvements we could have in this area: for example
the vacuum code could be smarter about not updating pg_database for each table
when called by autovacuum, and do it only once the whole autovacuum iteration
is done.
I updated the system catalogs documentation, but I didn't modify the
maintenance section. Also having some regression tests for this would be nice
but it's not really a very straightforward thing to do.
Catalog version bumped due to system catalog changes.
it's not necessary to have three separate calls anymore. This patch also
fixes things so we don't try to read pg_internal.init until after we've
obtained lock on the target database; which was fairly harmless, but it's
certainly cleaner this way.
The former approach used ExclusiveLock on pg_database, which being a
cluster-wide lock meant only one of these operations could proceed at
a time; worse, it also blocked all incoming connections in ReverifyMyDatabase.
Now that we have LockSharedObject(), we can use locks of different types
applied to databases considered as objects. This allows much more
flexible management of the interlocking: two CREATE DATABASEs need not
block each other, and need not block connections except to the template
database being used. Similarly DROP DATABASE doesn't block unrelated
operations. The locking used in flatfiles.c is also much narrower in
scope than before. Per recent proposal.
in various places that were previously doing ad hoc pg_database searches.
This may speed up database-related privilege checks a little bit, but
the main motivation is to eliminate the performance reason for having
ReverifyMyDatabase do such a lot of stuff (viz, avoiding repeat scans
of pg_database during backend startup). The locking reason for having
that routine is about to go away, and it'd be good to have the option
to break it up.
This commit doesn't make much functional change, but it does eliminate some
duplicated code --- for instance, PageIsNew tests are now done inside
XLogReadBuffer rather than by each caller.
The GIST xlog code still needs a lot of love, but I'll worry about that
separately.
an LWLock instead of a spinlock. This hardly matters on Unix machines
but should improve startup performance on Windows (or any port using
EXEC_BACKEND). Per previous discussion.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
delay and limit, both as global GUCs and as table-specific entries in
pg_autovacuum. stats_reset_on_server_start is now OFF by default,
but a reset is forced if we did WAL replay. XID-wrap vacuums do not
ANALYZE, but do FREEZE if it's a template database. Alvaro Herrera
exit, instead of trying to take shortcuts. Introduce some additional
shutdown callback routines to eliminate kluges like having ProcKill
be responsible for shutting down the buffer manager. Ensure that the
order of operations during shutdown is predictable and what you would
expect given the module layering.
track shared relations in a separate hashtable, so that operations done
from different databases are counted correctly. Add proper support for
anti-XID-wraparound vacuuming, even in databases that are never connected
to and so have no stats entries. Miscellaneous other bug fixes.
Alvaro Herrera, some additional fixes by Tom Lane.
