pgsql: Fix broken snapshot handling in parallel workers.

From: Robert Haas <rhaas(at)postgresql(dot)org>
To: pgsql-committers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: pgsql: Fix broken snapshot handling in parallel workers.
Date: 2021-08-25 13:31:18
Message-ID: E1mIszu-00029e-5s@gemulon.postgresql.org
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Fix broken snapshot handling in parallel workers.

Pengchengliu reported an assertion failure in a parallel woker while
performing a parallel scan using an overflowed snapshot. The proximate
cause is that TransactionXmin was set to an incorrect value. The
underlying cause is incorrect snapshot handling in parallel.c.

In particular, InitializeParallelDSM() was unconditionally calling
GetTransactionSnapshot(), because I (rhaas) mistakenly thought that
was always retrieving an existing snapshot whereas, at isolation
levels less than REPEATABLE READ, it's actually taking a new one. So
instead do this only at higher isolation levels where there actually
is a single snapshot for the whole transaction.

By itself, this is not a sufficient fix, because we still need to
guarantee that TransactionXmin gets set properly in the workers. The
easiest way to do that seems to be to install the leader's active
snapshot as the transaction snapshot if the leader did not serialize a
transaction snapshot. This doesn't affect the results of future
GetTrasnactionSnapshot() calls since those have to take a new snapshot
anyway; what we care about is the side effect of setting TransactionXmin.

Report by Pengchengliu. Patch by Greg Nancarrow, except for some comment
text which I supplied.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/002f01d748ac$eaa781a0$bff684e0$@tju.edu.cn

Branch
------
master

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a780b2fcce6cf45462946fffcd84021a4d1429c8

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c | 52 +++++++++++++++++++++++++----------
1 file changed, 38 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)

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