Re: Online checksums patch - once again

On 2020-Oct-05, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

> The code in sendFile() in basebackup.c seems suspicious in that regard. It
> calls DataChecksumsNeedVerify() once before starting to read the file. Isn't
> it possible for the checksums flag to change while it's reading the file and
> sending it to the client? I hope there are CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls
> buried somewhere in the loop, because it could take minutes to send the
> whole file.
>
> I would feel better if the state transition of the "checksums" flag could
> only happen in a few safe places, or there were some other safeguards for
> this. I think that's what Andres was trying to say earlier in the thread on
> ProcSignalBarriers. I'm not sure what the interface to that should be. It
> could be something like HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS(), where normally all
> procsignals are handled on CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS(), but you could "hold off"
> some if needed. Or something else. Or maybe we can just use
> HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS() for this. It's more coarse-grained than necessary,
> but probably doesn't matter in practice.

I hope you're not suggesting that interrupts would be held for the whole
transmission of a file, which you say could take minutes. If we do have
an interrupt holdoff, then it has to be pretty short; users (and
systemd) despair if service shutdown is delayed more than a few seconds.