Re: GiST VACUUM

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 3:32 AM Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 11:38 PM Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote:
> > * I moved the logic to extend a 32-bit XID to 64-bits to a new helper
> > function in varsup.c.
>
> I'm a bit uneasy about making this into a generally available function
> for reuse. I think we should instead come up with a very small number
> of sources of fxids that known to be free of races because of some
> well explained interlocking.
>

I have two more cases in undo patch series where the same function is
needed and it is safe to use it there. The first place is twophase.c
for rolling back prepared transactions where we know that we don't
support aborted xacts that are older than 2 billion, so we can rely on
such a function. We also need it in undodiscard.c to compute the
value of oldestFullXidHavingUnappliedUndo. See the usage of
GetEpochForXid in unprocessing patches. Now, we might find a way to
avoid using in one of these places by doing some more work, but not
sure we can avoid from all the three places (one proposed by this
patch and two by undo patchset).

> For example, I believe it is safe to convert an xid obtained from a
> WAL record during recovery, because (for now) recovery is a single
> thread of execution and the next fxid can't advance underneath you.
> So I think XLogRecGetFullXid(XLogReaderState *record)[1] as I'm about
> to propose in another thread (though I've forgotten who wrote it,
> maybe Andres, Amit or me, but if it wasn't me then it's exactly what I
> would have written) is a safe blessed source of fxids. The rationale
> for writing this function instead of an earlier code that looked much
> like your proposed helper function, during EDB-internal review of
> zheap stuff, was this: if we provide a general purpose xid->fxid
> facility, it's virtually guaranteed that someone will eventually use
> it to shoot footwards, by acquiring an xid from somewhere, and then
> some arbitrary time later extending it to a fxid when no interlocking
> guarantees that the later conversion has the correct epoch.
>
> I'd like to figure out how to maintain full versions of the
> procarray.c-managed xid horizons, without widening the shared memory
> representation. I was planning to think harder about for 13.
> Obviously that doesn't help you now. So I'm wondering if you should
> just open-code this for now, and put in a comment about why it's safe
> and a note that there'll hopefully be a fxid horizon available in a
> later release?
>

Do you suggest to open code for all the three places for now? I am
not against open coding the logic for now but not sure if we can
eliminate its need because even if we can do what you are saying with
procarray.c-managed xid horizons, I think we need to do something
about clog.

--
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com