Re: Race condition in HEAD, possibly due to PGPROC splitup

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Comments?

I think there is a small bug here:

+ 			TransactionId xid = pgxact->xid;
+
+ 			/*
+ 			 * Don't record locks for transactions if we know they have already
+ 			 * issued their WAL record for commit but not yet released lock.
+ 			 * It is still possible that we see locks held by already complete
+ 			 * transactions, if they haven't yet zeroed their xids.
+ 			 */
+ 			if (!TransactionIdIsValid(xid))
+ 				continue;

  			accessExclusiveLocks[index].xid = pgxact->xid;
  			accessExclusiveLocks[index].dbOid = lock->tag.locktag_field1;

...because you're fetching pgxact->xid, testing whether it's valid,
and then fetching it again.  It could change in the meantime.  You
probably want to change the assignment to read:

  			accessExclusiveLocks[index].xid = xid;

Also, we should probably change this pointer to be declared volatile:

  			PGXACT	   *pgxact = &ProcGlobal->allPgXact[proc->pgprocno];

Otherwise, I think the compiler might get cute and decide to fetch the
xid twice anyway, effectively undoing our attempt to pull it into a
local variable.

I think this comment could be clarified in some way, to make it more
clear that we had a bug at one point, and it was fixed - the "from a
time when they were possible" language wouldn't be entirely clear to
me after the fact:

+  * Zero xids should no longer be possible, but we may be replaying WAL
+  * from a time when they were possible.

It would probably make sense to break out of this loop if a match is found:

! 			for (i = 0; i < nxids; i++)
! 			{
! 				if (lock->xid == xids[i])
! 					found = true;
! 			}

I'm not sure I fully understand the rest of this, but those are the
only things I noticed on a read-through.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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