Bug in StartupSUBTRANS

From: Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Bug in StartupSUBTRANS
Date: 2016-02-09 17:42:21
Message-ID: CAMkU=1z_HbBm8V9KK67-J48=u4RiLv3HZSnjWdV2=o_s5_SbjA@mail.gmail.com
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While testing the crash resilience of the recent 2-part-commit
improvements, I've run into a problem where sometimes after a crash
the recovery process creates zeroed files in pg_subtrans until it
exhausts all disk space.

Looking at the code, it looks like it does not anticipate that the xid
might wrap around, meaning startPage/endPage might also wrap around.
But obviously should not do so at int_max but rather at some much
smaller other value.

Here is the state near the time of disaster:

(gdb) print startPage
$1 = 2813758
(gdb) print endPage
$2 = 179
(gdb) p oldestActiveXID
$3 = 4293679649
(gdb) p ShmemVariableCache->nextXid
$4 = 367568

Attached is my attempt at a fix. I've tested it for the ability to
start up the crashed server again, but have not tested the full stack
from initdb to crash with this in place.

Assuming I'm right, I am curious how this problem has been around so
long without being discovered previously. So maybe I'm not right. I
found this with some code to accelerate the consumption of xids, but I
don't see how that would lead to a false positive here.

I think I found it testing 2-part-commit because that inherently means
leaving an active XID hanging around for a few checkpoint cycles,
which is something I've never intentionally tested before.

Cheers,

Jeff

Attachment Content-Type Size
StartupSUB.patch application/octet-stream 737 bytes

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