Fix init of WAL page header at startup (#8914)

If the primary is started at an LSN within the first of a 16 MB WAL
segment, the "long XLOG page header" at the beginning of the segment was
not initialized correctly. That has gone unnnoticed, because under
normal circumstances, nothing looks at the page header. The WAL that is
streamed to the safekeepers starts at the new record's LSN, not at the
beginning of the page, so that bogus page header didn't propagate
elsewhere, and a primary server doesn't normally read the WAL its
written. Which is good because the contents of the page would be bogus
anyway, as it wouldn't contain any of the records before the LSN where
the new record is written.

Except that in the following cases a primary does read its own WAL:

1. When there are two-phase transactions in prepared state at
checkpoint. The checkpointer reads the two-phase state from the
XLOG_XACT_PREPARE record, and writes it to a file in pg_twophase/.

2. Logical decoding reads the WAL starting from the replication slot's
restart LSN.

This PR fixes the problem with two-phase transactions. For that, it's
sufficient to initialize the page header correctly. The checkpointer
only needs to read XLOG_XACT_PREPARE records that were generated after
the server startup, so it's still OK that older WAL is missing / bogus.

I have not investigated if we have a problem with logical decoding,
however. Let's deal with that separately.

Special thanks to @Lzjing-1997, who independently found the same bug
and opened a PR to fix it, although I did not use that PR.
This commit is contained in:
Heikki Linnakangas
2024-09-21 04:00:38 +03:00
committed by GitHub
parent f03f7b3868
commit 9a32aa828d
6 changed files with 34 additions and 13 deletions

View File

@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ from fixtures.neon_fixtures import (
PgBin,
fork_at_current_lsn,
import_timeline_from_vanilla_postgres,
wait_for_wal_insert_lsn,
)
@@ -22,11 +23,6 @@ def twophase_test_on_timeline(env: NeonEnv):
conn = endpoint.connect()
cur = conn.cursor()
# FIXME: Switch to the next WAL segment, to work around the bug fixed in
# https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/8914. When that is merged, this can be
# removed.
cur.execute("select pg_switch_wal()")
cur.execute("CREATE TABLE foo (t text)")
# Prepare a transaction that will insert a row
@@ -140,3 +136,28 @@ def test_twophase_nonzero_epoch(
vanilla_pg.stop() # don't need the original server anymore
twophase_test_on_timeline(env)
def test_twophase_at_wal_segment_start(neon_simple_env: NeonEnv):
"""
Same as 'test_twophase' test, but the server is started at an LSN at the beginning
of a WAL segment. We had a bug where we didn't initialize the "long XLOG page header"
at the beginning of the segment correctly, which was detected when the checkpointer
tried to read the XLOG_XACT_PREPARE record from the WAL, if that record was on the
very first page of a WAL segment and the server was started up at that first page.
"""
env = neon_simple_env
timeline_id = env.neon_cli.create_branch("test_twophase", "main")
endpoint = env.endpoints.create_start(
"test_twophase", config_lines=["max_prepared_transactions=5"]
)
endpoint.safe_psql("SELECT pg_switch_wal()")
# to avoid hitting https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/9079, wait for the
# WAL to reach the pageserver.
wait_for_wal_insert_lsn(env, endpoint, env.initial_tenant, timeline_id)
endpoint.stop_and_destroy()
twophase_test_on_timeline(env)