On 2/9/22 01:43, Andres Freund wrote:
Hi,

On 2022-02-08 22:13:01 +0100, Tomas Vondra wrote:
On 10/24/21 03:40, Noah Misch wrote:
Avoid race in RelationBuildDesc() affecting CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY.

CIC and REINDEX CONCURRENTLY assume backends see their catalog changes
no later than each backend's next transaction start.  That failed to
hold when a backend absorbed a relevant invalidation in the middle of
running RelationBuildDesc() on the CIC index.  Queries that use the
resulting index can silently fail to find rows.  Fix this for future
index builds by making RelationBuildDesc() loop until it finishes
without accepting a relevant invalidation.  It may be necessary to
reindex to recover from past occurrences; REINDEX CONCURRENTLY suffices.
Back-patch to 9.6 (all supported versions).

Noah Misch and Andrey Borodin, reviewed (in earlier versions) by Andres
Freund.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210730022548.ga1940...@gust.leadboat.com


Unfortunately, this seems to have broken CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS builds. Since
this commit, initdb never completes due to infinite retrying over and over
(on the first RelationBuildDesc call).

Ugh. Do we need to do something about WRT the next set of minor releases? Is
there a a chance of this occuring in "real" workloads?


AFAICS this only affects builds with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS, and anyone running such build in production clearly likes painful things anyway.

But really, for the infinite loop to happen, building a relation descriptor has to invalidate a cache. And I haven't found a way to do that without the CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS thing.

Also, all the November minor releases include this commit, and there were no reports about this (pretty obvious) issue. Buildfarm did not complain either (but an animal may be stuck for months and we would not know about it).


regards

--
Tomas Vondra
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company


Reply via email to