Re: [HACKERS] Quite strange crash

[Tom Lane]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nathan Myers) writes:
> If a backend dies while holding a lock, doesn't that imply that
> the shared memory may be in an inconsistent state?

Yup.  I had just come to the realization that we'd be best off to treat
the *entire* period from SpinAcquire to SpinRelease as a critical
section for the purposes of die().  That is, response to SIGTERM will be
held off until we have released the spinlock.  Most of the places where
we grab spinlocks would have to make such a critical section anyway, at
least for large parts of the time that they are holding the spinlock,
because they are manipulating shared data structures and the
instantaneous intermediate states aren't always self-consistent.  So we
might as well follow the KISS principle and just do START_CRIT_SECTION
in SpinAcquire and END_CRIT_SECTION in SpinRelease.

Vadim, any objection?

                        regards, tom lane