Fix race condition in relcache init file invalidation.
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Fix race condition in relcache init file invalidation. The previous code tried to synchronize by unlinking the init file twice, but that doesn't actually work: it leaves a window wherein a third process could read the already-stale init file but miss the SI messages that would tell it the data is stale. The result would be bizarre failures in catalog accesses, typically "could not read block 0 in file ..." later during startup. Instead, hold RelCacheInitLock across both the unlink and the sending of the SI messages. This is more straightforward, and might even be a bit faster since only one unlink call is needed. This has been wrong since it was put in (in 2002!), so back-patch to all supported releases.
Files
| Path | Change | +/− |
|---|---|---|
| src/backend/utils/cache/inval.c | modified | +4 −4 |
| src/backend/utils/cache/relcache.c | modified | +37 −31 |
| src/include/utils/relcache.h | modified | +2 −1 |