Re: Injection points: some tools to wait and wake

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 04:51:45PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 03:01:40PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> > 0002 is a polished version of the TAP test that makes use of this
> > facility, providing coverage for the bug fixed by 7863ee4def65
> > (reverting this commit causes the test to fail), where a restart point 
> > runs across a promotion request.  The trick is to stop the
> > checkpointer in the middle of a restart point and issue a promotion
> > in-between.
> 
> The CF bot has been screaming at this one on Windows because the
> process started with IPC::Run::start was not properly finished, so
> attached is an updated version to bring that back to green.

Thanks for the patch, that's a very cool feature!

Random comments:

1 ===

+CREATE FUNCTION injection_points_wake()

what about injection_points_wakeup() instead?

2 ===
+/* Shared state information for injection points. */
+typedef struct InjectionPointSharedState
+{
+       /* protects accesses to wait_counts */
+       slock_t         lock;
+
+       /* Counter advancing when injection_points_wake() is called */
+       int                     wait_counts;

If slock_t protects "only" one counter, then what about using pg_atomic_uint64
or pg_atomic_uint32 instead? And btw do we need wait_counts at all? (see comment 
number 4)

3 ===

+ * SQL function for waking a condition variable

waking up instead?

4 ===

+       for (;;)
+       {
+               int                     new_wait_counts;
+
+               SpinLockAcquire(&inj_state->lock);
+               new_wait_counts = inj_state->wait_counts;
+               SpinLockRelease(&inj_state->lock);
+
+               if (old_wait_counts != new_wait_counts)
+                       break;
+               ConditionVariableSleep(&inj_state->wait_point, injection_wait_event);
+       }

I'm wondering if this loop and wait_counts are needed, why not doing something
like (and completely get rid of wait_counts)?

"
    ConditionVariablePrepareToSleep(&inj_state->wait_point);
    ConditionVariableSleep(&inj_state->wait_point, injection_wait_event);
    ConditionVariableCancelSleep();
"

It's true that the comment above ConditionVariableSleep() mentions that:

"
 * This should be called in a predicate loop that tests for a specific exit
 * condition and otherwise sleeps
"

but is it needed in our particular case here?

Regards,

-- 
Bertrand Drouvot
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com