Re: problems on Solaris

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> On 2015-05-27 15:39:14 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 10:05 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
>> > Hm. So we have a *occasional* stack size exceeded failure and an
>> > occasional spinlock error in test_shm_mq. I'm inclined to think that
>> > this is a shm_mq problem, and not a more general locking problem - it
>> > seems likely, but not guaranteed, that that'd have materialized
>> > elsewhere.
>>
>> I think the problem might be that the spinlock-based memory barrier is
>> not re-entrant. Suppose some kind of barrier operation is in process,
>> and we've acquired the dummy spnlock but not yet released it. Just
>> then, we receive a signal. Since the shm_mq code sets
>> set_latch_on_sigusr1, procsignal_sigusr1_handler will set MyLatch.
>> SetLatch now includes barrier operations, so we'll try to acquire and
>> release the spinlock despite already holding it. Oops.
>
> Oh wow, that's bad, and could explain a couple of the problems we're
> seing. One possible way to fix is to replace the sequence with if
> (!TAS(spin)) S_UNLOCK();. But that'd mean TAS() has to be a barrier,
> even if the lock isn't free - which e.g. isn't the case for PowerPC's
> implementation :(

Another possibility is to make the fallback barrier implementation a
system call, like maybe kill(PostmasterPid, 0).

--
Robert Haas
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