Re: Set appropriate processing mode for auxiliary processes.

Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> writes:
> At first I was sure this was introduced by my refactorings in v17, but
> in fact it's been like this forever. I agree that InitProcessing makes
> much more sense. The ProcessingMode variable is initialized to
> InitProcessing, so I think we can simply remove that line from
> AuxiliaryProcessMainCommon(). There are existing
> "SetProcessingMode(InitProcessing)" calls in other Main functions too
> (AutoVacLauncherMain, BackgroundWorkerMain, etc.), and I think those can
> also be removed.

This only works if the postmaster can be trusted never to change the
variable; else children could inherit some other value via fork().
In that connection, it seems a bit scary that postmaster.c contains a
couple of calls "SetProcessingMode(NormalProcessing)". It looks like
they are in functions that should only be executed by child processes,
but should we try to move them somewhere else? Another idea could be
to add an Assert to SetProcessingMode that insists that it can't be
executed by the postmaster.

regards, tom lane