Re: Reducing the chunk header sizes on all memory context types

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>, Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123(at)gmail(dot)com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, Yura Sokolov <y(dot)sokolov(at)postgrespro(dot)ru>, PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Reducing the chunk header sizes on all memory context types
Date: 2022-10-06 21:57:01
Message-ID: 2975022.1665093421@sss.pgh.pa.us
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I wrote:
> I also avoided using 001: based on my work with converting guc.c to use
> palloc [1], it seems that pfree'ing a malloc-provided pointer is likely
> to see 001 a lot, at least on 64-bit glibc platforms.

I poked at this some more by creating a function that intentionally
does pfree(malloc(N)) for various values of N.

RHEL8, x86_64: the low-order nibble of the header is consistently 0001.

macOS 12.6, arm64: the low-order nibble is consistently 0000.

FreeBSD 13.0, arm64: Usually the low-order nibble is 0000 or 1111,
but for some smaller values of N it sometimes comes up as 0010.

NetBSD 9.2, amd64: results similar to FreeBSD.

I still haven't looked into anybody's source code, but based on these
results I'm inclined to leave both 001 and 010 IDs unused for now.
That'll help the GUC malloc -> palloc transition tremendously, because
people will get fairly clear errors rather than weird assertions
and/or memory corruption. That'll leave us in a situation where only
one more context ID can be assigned without risk of reducing our error
detection ability, but I'm content with that for now.

regards, tom lane

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