Defer restoration of libraries in parallel workers.

macdice · macdice · commit 6c3c9d418918 · 2018-09-20T14:21:18.000+12:00
Several users of extensions complained of crashes in parallel workers that turned out to be due to syscache access from their _PG_init() functions. Reorder the initialization of parallel workers so that libraries are restored after the caches are initialized, and inside a transaction. This was reported in bug #15350 and elsewhere. We don't consider it to be a bug: extensions shouldn't do that, because then they can't be used in shared_preload_libraries. However, it's a fairly obscure hazard and these extensions worked in practice before parallel query came along. So let's make it work. Later commits might add a warning message and eventually an error. Back-patch to 9.6, where parallel query landed. Author: Thomas Munro Reviewed-by: Amit Kapila Reported-by: Kieran McCusker, Jimmy Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/153512195228.1489.8545997741965926448%40wrigleys.postgresql.org
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c b/src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c
@@ -1311,14 +1311,6 @@ ParallelWorkerMain(Datum main_arg)
 							   fps->parallel_master_pid))
 		return;
 
-	/*
-	 * Load libraries that were loaded by original backend.  We want to do
-	 * this before restoring GUCs, because the libraries might define custom
-	 * variables.
-	 */
-	libraryspace = shm_toc_lookup(toc, PARALLEL_KEY_LIBRARY, false);
-	RestoreLibraryState(libraryspace);
-
 	/*
 	 * Identify the entry point to be called.  In theory this could result in
 	 * loading an additional library, though most likely the entry point is in
@@ -1341,9 +1333,17 @@ ParallelWorkerMain(Datum main_arg)
 	 */
 	SetClientEncoding(GetDatabaseEncoding());
 
+	/*
+	 * Load libraries that were loaded by original backend.  We want to do
+	 * this before restoring GUCs, because the libraries might define custom
+	 * variables.
+	 */
+	libraryspace = shm_toc_lookup(toc, PARALLEL_KEY_LIBRARY, false);
+	StartTransactionCommand();
+	RestoreLibraryState(libraryspace);
+
 	/* Restore GUC values from launching backend. */
 	gucspace = shm_toc_lookup(toc, PARALLEL_KEY_GUC, false);
-	StartTransactionCommand();
 	RestoreGUCState(gucspace);
 	CommitTransactionCommand();
 
