Instead of spawning helper threads, we now use Tokio tasks. There
are multiple Tokio runtimes, for different kinds of tasks. One for
serving libpq client connections, another for background operations
like GC and compaction, and so on. That's not strictly required, we
could use just one runtime, but with this you can still get an
overview of what's happening with "top -H".
There's one subtle behavior in how TenantState is updated. Before this
patch, if you deleted all timelines from a tenant, its GC and
compaction loops were stopped, and the tenant went back to Idle
state. We no longer do that. The empty tenant stays Active. The
changes to test_tenant_tasks.py are related to that.
There's still plenty of synchronous code and blocking. For example, we
still use blocking std::io functions for all file I/O, and the
communication with WAL redo processes is still uses low-level unix
poll(). We might want to rewrite those later, but this will do for
now. The model is that local file I/O is considered to be fast enough
that blocking - and preventing other tasks running in the same thread -
is acceptable.
Reorganize existing READMEs and other documentation files into mdbook
format. The resulting Table of Contents is a mix of placeholders for
docs that we should write, and documentation files that we already had,
dropped into the most appropriate place.
Update the Pageserver overview diagram. Add sections on thread
management and WAL redo processes.
Add all the RFCs to the mdbook Table of Content too.
Per github issue #1979
