Re: Fix early elog(FATAL)

On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 10:07:00AM -0600, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 07:34:14PM -0800, Noah Misch wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 10, 2024 at 04:18:19PM -0600, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> >> FWIW I'd probably vote for option 1. That keeps the initialization of the
> >> globals together, reduces the call sites, and fixes the bug. I'd worry a
> >> little about moving the MyProcPid assignments out of that function without
> >> adding a bunch of commentary to explain why.
> >
> > Can you say more about that? A comment about MyProcPid could say "fork() is
> > the one thing that changes the getpid() return value". To me, the things
> > InitProcessGlobals() sets are all different. MyProcPid can be set without
> > elog(ERROR) and gets invalidated at fork(). The others reasonably could
> > elog(ERROR). (They currently don't.) The random state could have a different
> > lifecycle. If we had a builtin pooler that reused processes, we'd
> > reinitialize random state at each process reuse, not at each fork(). So I see
> > the grouping of (MyProcPid, MyStartTimestamp, random seed) as mostly an
> > accident of history.
>
> Fair enough. I suppose part of my hesitation stems from expecting hackers
> to be more likely to remember to call InitProcessGlobals() than to
> initialize MyProcPid. But given your change requires initializing
> MyProcPid in exactly 2 places, and there are unlikely to be more in the
> near future, I might be overthinking it.

I don't feel strongly either way. I did write it the option-1 way originally.
Then I started thinking about changes at a distance causing the other
InitProcessGlobals() tasks to palloc or elog. We could do option-1 in master
and keep the back branches in their current state.