Files
postgresql/src/backend/replication
Tom Lane 8620a7f6db Code review for server's handling of "tablespace map" files.
While looking at Robert Foggia's report, I noticed a passel of
other issues in the same area:

* The scheme for backslash-quoting newlines in pathnames is just
wrong; it will misbehave if the last ordinary character in a pathname
is a backslash.  I'm not sure why we're bothering to allow newlines
in tablespace paths, but if we're going to do it we should do it
without introducing other problems.  Hence, backslashes themselves
have to be backslashed too.

* The author hadn't read the sscanf man page very carefully, because
this code would drop any leading whitespace from the path.  (I doubt
that a tablespace path with leading whitespace could happen in
practice; but if we're bothering to allow newlines in the path, it
sure seems like leading whitespace is little less implausible.)  Using
sscanf for the task of finding the first space is overkill anyway.

* While I'm not 100% sure what the rationale for escaping both \r and
\n is, if the idea is to allow Windows newlines in the file then this
code failed, because it'd throw an error if it saw \r followed by \n.

* There's no cross-check for an incomplete final line in the map file,
which would be a likely apparent symptom of the improper-escaping
bug.

On the generation end, aside from the escaping issue we have:

* If needtblspcmapfile is true then do_pg_start_backup will pass back
escaped strings in tablespaceinfo->path values, which no caller wants
or is prepared to deal with.  I'm not sure if there's a live bug from
that, but it looks like there might be (given the dubious assumption
that anyone actually has newlines in their tablespace paths).

* It's not being very paranoid about the possibility of random stuff
in the pg_tblspc directory.  IMO we should ignore anything without an
OID-like name.

The escaping rule change doesn't seem back-patchable: it'll require
doubling of backslashes in the tablespace_map file, which is basically
a basebackup format change.  The odds of that causing trouble are
considerably more than the odds of the existing bug causing trouble.
The rest of this seems somewhat unlikely to cause problems too,
so no back-patch.
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src/backend/replication/README

Walreceiver - libpqwalreceiver API
----------------------------------

The transport-specific part of walreceiver, responsible for connecting to
the primary server, receiving WAL files and sending messages, is loaded
dynamically to avoid having to link the main server binary with libpq.
The dynamically loaded module is in libpqwalreceiver subdirectory.

The dynamically loaded module implements a set of functions with details
about each one of them provided in src/include/replication/walreceiver.h.

This API should be considered internal at the moment, but we could open it
up for 3rd party replacements of libpqwalreceiver in the future, allowing
pluggable methods for receiving WAL.

Walreceiver IPC
---------------

When the WAL replay in startup process has reached the end of archived WAL,
restorable using restore_command, it starts up the walreceiver process
to fetch more WAL (if streaming replication is configured).

Walreceiver is a postmaster subprocess, so the startup process can't fork it
directly. Instead, it sends a signal to postmaster, asking postmaster to launch
it. Before that, however, startup process fills in WalRcvData->conninfo
and WalRcvData->slotname, and initializes the starting point in
WalRcvData->receiveStart.

As walreceiver receives WAL from the primary server, and writes and flushes
it to disk (in pg_wal), it updates WalRcvData->flushedUpto and signals
the startup process to know how far WAL replay can advance.

Walreceiver sends information about replication progress to the primary server
whenever it either writes or flushes new WAL, or the specified interval elapses.
This is used for reporting purpose.

Walsender IPC
-------------

At shutdown, postmaster handles walsender processes differently from regular
backends. It waits for regular backends to die before writing the
shutdown checkpoint and terminating pgarch and other auxiliary processes, but
that's not desirable for walsenders, because we want the standby servers to
receive all the WAL, including the shutdown checkpoint, before the primary
is shut down. Therefore postmaster treats walsenders like the pgarch process,
and instructs them to terminate at PM_SHUTDOWN_2 phase, after all regular
backends have died and checkpointer has issued the shutdown checkpoint.

When postmaster accepts a connection, it immediately forks a new process
to handle the handshake and authentication, and the process initializes to
become a backend. Postmaster doesn't know if the process becomes a regular
backend or a walsender process at that time - that's indicated in the
connection handshake - so we need some extra signaling to let postmaster
identify walsender processes.

When walsender process starts up, it marks itself as a walsender process in
the PMSignal array. That way postmaster can tell it apart from regular
backends.

Note that no big harm is done if postmaster thinks that a walsender is a
regular backend; it will just terminate the walsender earlier in the shutdown
phase. A walsender will look like a regular backend until it's done with the
initialization and has marked itself in PMSignal array, and at process
termination, after unmarking the PMSignal slot.

Each walsender allocates an entry from the WalSndCtl array, and tracks
information about replication progress. User can monitor them via
statistics views.


Walsender - walreceiver protocol
--------------------------------

See manual.