Re: BUG #17928: Standby fails to decode WAL on termination of primary

On Sun, Aug 13, 2023 at 03:12:34PM +1200, Thomas Munro wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 13, 2023 at 9:13 AM Noah Misch <noah(at)leadboat(dot)com> wrote:
> > Any user could call pg_logical_emit_message() to silently terminate the WAL
> > stream, which is far worse than the original bug. So far, I'm seeing one way
> > to clearly fix $SUBJECT without that harm. When a record header spans a page
> > boundary, read the next page to reassemble the header. If
> > !ValidXLogRecordHeader() (invalid xl_rmid or xl_prev), treat as end of WAL.
> > Otherwise, read the whole record in chunks, calculating CRC. If CRC is
> > invalid, treat as end of WAL. Otherwise, ereport(FATAL) for the oversized
> > record. A side benefit would be avoiding useless large allocations (1GB
> > backend, 4GB frontend) as discussed upthread. May as well do the xl_rmid and
> > xl_prev checks in all branches, to avoid needless XLogRecordMaxSize-1
> > allocations. Thoughts? For invalid-length records in v16+, since every such
> > record is end-of-wal or corruption, those versions could skip the CRC.
>
> That sounds quite strong. But... why couldn't the existing
> xlp_rem_len cross-check protect us from this failure mode? If we
> could defer the allocation until after that check (and the usual
> ValidXLogRecordHeader() check), I think we'd know that we're really
> looking at a size that was actually written in both pages (which must
> also have survived xlp_pageaddr check), no?

Hmm, I think that is right. A coincidental match of the 32-bit CRC is more
probable than having all those fields appear valid by coincidence, especially
xlp_pageaddr.