Re: [HACKERS] Parallel tuplesort (for parallel B-Tree index creation)

Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>

From: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
To: nospam-abuse@bloodgate.com
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com>, Rushabh Lathia <rushabh.lathia@gmail.com>, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Corey Huinker <corey.huinker@gmail.com>
Date: 2018-02-05T21:57:34Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 1:39 PM, Tels <nospam-abuse@bloodgate.com> wrote:
> Are the uninitialized bytes that are written out "whatever was in the
> memory previously" or just some "0x00 bytes from the allocation but not
> yet overwritten from the PG code"?
>
> Because the first sounds like it could be a security problem - if random
> junk bytes go out to the disk, and stay there, information could
> inadvertedly leak to permanent storage.

But you can say the same thing about *any* of the
write()-of-uninitialized-bytes Valgrind suppressions that already
exist. There are quite a few of those.

That just isn't part of our security model.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan


Commits

  1. Support parallel btree index builds.

  2. Report an ERROR if a parallel worker fails to start properly.

  3. Transfer state pertaining to pending REINDEX operations to workers.

  4. Add a barrier primitive for synchronizing backends.

  5. Allow DML commands that create tables to use parallel query.

  6. Refactor GetOldestXmin() to use flags

  7. Fix regression in parallel planning against inheritance tables.

  8. Don't create "holes" in BufFiles, in the new logtape code.

  9. Simplify the code for logical tape read buffers.

  10. Fix excessive memory consumption in the new sort pre-reading code.

  11. Implement binary heap replace-top operation in a smarter way.

  12. Cosmetic code cleanup in commands/extension.c.

  13. Speed up planner's scanning for parallel-query hazards.

  14. Read from the same worker repeatedly until it returns no tuple.

  15. Improve tuplesort.c to support variable merge order. The original coding