Re: Unportable implementation of background worker start

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> On 2017-04-24 17:33:39 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> coypu's problem is unrelated:

> Note I was linking the 9.6 report form coypu, not HEAD. Afaics the 9.6
> failure is the same as gharial's mode of failure.

[ looks closer... ] Oh: the 9.6 run occurred first, and the failures on
HEAD and 9.5 are presumably follow-on damage because the stuck postmaster
hasn't released semaphores.

A bit of googling establishes that NetBSD 5.1 has a broken pselect
implementation:

http://gnats.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=43625

That says they fixed it in later versions but not 5.1 :-(

I can't find any similar smoking gun on the web for HPUX, but
I'd fully expect their bug database to be behind a paywall.

What I'm inclined to do is to revert the pselect change but not the other,
to see if that fixes these two animals. If it does, we could look into
blacklisting these particular platforms when choosing pselect.

regards, tom lane