Re: Posix Shared Mem patch

On 06/26/2012 07:30 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> "A.M." <agentm(at)themactionfaction(dot)com> writes:
>> On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:12 PM, Daniel Farina wrote:
>>> I'm simply suggesting that for additional benefits it may be worth
>>> thinking about getting around nattach and thus SysV shmem, especially
>>> with regard to safety, in an open-ended way.
>
>> I solved this via fcntl locking.
>
> No, you didn't, because fcntl locks aren't inherited by child processes.
> Too bad, because they'd be a great solution otherwise.
>

You claimed this last time and I replied:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-04/msg00656.php

"I address this race condition by ensuring that a lock-holding violator
is the postmaster or a postmaster child. If such as condition is
detected, the child exits immediately without touching the shared
memory. POSIX shmem is inherited via file descriptors."

This is possible because the locking API allows one to request which PID
violates the lock. The child expects the lock to be held and checks that
the PID is the parent. If the lock is not held, that means that the
postmaster is dead, so the child exits immediately.

Cheers,
M