Re: Atomics for heap_parallelscan_nextpage()

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, David Rowley <david.rowley@2ndquadrant.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Amit Khandekar <amitdkhan.pg@gmail.com>, Ashutosh Bapat <ashutosh.bapat@enterprisedb.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Date: 2017-08-16T17:40:09Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
I wrote:
> I can confirm that on dromedary, that regression test case is attempting
> to create a TOC with a not-well-aligned size: 93268 = 0x16c54 bytes.

... although, on closer look, it still seems like we have a fundamental
bit of schizophrenia here, because on this machine

$ grep ALIGN pg_config.h
#define ALIGNOF_DOUBLE 4
#define ALIGNOF_INT 4
#define ALIGNOF_LONG 4
#define ALIGNOF_LONG_LONG_INT 4
#define ALIGNOF_SHORT 2
#define MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF 4

Basically, therefore, ISTM that it is not a good thing that the atomics
code thinks it can rely on 8-byte-aligned data when the entire rest of
the system believes that 4-byte alignment is enough for anything.

I was wondering why the shm_toc code was using BUFFERALIGN and not
MAXALIGN, and I now suspect that the answer is "it's an entirely
undocumented kluge to make the atomics code not crash on 32-bit
machines, so long as nobody puts a pg_atomic_uint64 anywhere except
in a shm_toc".

I'm not sure that that's good enough, and I'm damn sure that it
shouldn't be undocumented.

			regards, tom lane


Commits

  1. Fix pg_atomic_u64 initialization.

  2. Fix shm_toc.c to always return buffer-aligned memory.

  3. Use atomic ops to hand out pages to scan in parallel scan.

  4. Improve 64bit atomics support.