Re: Amcheck: do rightlink verification with lock coupling

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 10:16:12AM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>On 2019-Sep-12, Andrey Borodin wrote:
>
>> This patch violates one of amcheck design principles: current code
>> does not ever take more than one page lock. I do not know: should we
>> hold this rule or should we use more deep check?
>
>The check does seem worthwhile to me.
>
>As far as I know, in btree you can lock the right sibling of a page
>while keeping lock on the page itself, without risk of deadlock. So I'm
>not sure what's the issue with that. This is in the README:
>
> In most cases we release our lock and pin on a page before attempting
> to acquire pin and lock on the page we are moving to. In a few places
> it is necessary to lock the next page before releasing the current one.
> This is safe when moving right or up, but not when moving left or down
> (else we'd create the possibility of deadlocks).
>
>I suppose Peter was concerned about being able to run amcheck without
>causing any trouble at all for concurrent operation; maybe we can retain
>that property by making this check optional.
>

Peter, any opinion on this proposed amcheck patch? In the other thread
[1] you seemed to agree this is worth checking, and Alvaro's proposal to
make this check optional seems like a reasonable compromise with respect
to the locking.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/DA9B33AC-53CB-4643-96D4-7A0BBC037FA1(at)yandex-team(dot)ru

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