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Vlad Lazar 34996416d6 pageserver: guard against WAL gaps in the interpreted protocol (#10858)
## Problem

The interpreted SK <-> PS protocol does not guard against gaps (neither
does the Vanilla one, but that's beside the point).

## Summary of changes

Extend the protocol to include the start LSN of the PG WAL section from
which the records were interpreted.
Validation is enabled via a config flag on the pageserver and works as
follows:

**Case 1**: `raw_wal_start_lsn` is smaller than the requested LSN
There can't be gaps here, but we check that the shard received records
which it hasn't seen before.

**Case 2**: `raw_wal_start_lsn` is equal to the requested LSN
This is the happy case. No gap and nothing to check

**Case 3**: `raw_wal_start_lsn` is greater than the requested LSN
This is a gap.

To make Case 3 work I had to bend the protocol a bit.
We read record chunks of WAL which aren't record aligned and feed them
to the decoder.
The picture below shows a shard which subscribes at a position somewhere
within Record 2.
We already have a wal reader which is below that position so we wait to
catch up.
We read some wal in Read 1 (all of Record 1 and some of Record 2). The
new shard doesn't
need Record 1 (it has already processed it according to the starting
position), but we read
past it's starting position. When we do Read 2, we decode Record 2 and
ship it off to the shard,
but the starting position of Read 2 is greater than the starting
position the shard requested.
This looks like a gap.


![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8aed292e-5d62-46a3-9b01-fbf9dc25efe0)

To make it work, we extend the protocol to send an empty
`InterpretedWalRecords` to shards
if the WAL the records originated from ends the requested start
position. On the pageserver,
that just updates the tracking LSNs in memory (no-op really). This gives
us a workaround for
the fake gap.

As a drive by, make `InterpretedWalRecords::next_record_lsn` mandatory
in the application level definition.
It's always included.

Related: https://github.com/neondatabase/cloud/issues/23935
2025-02-20 17:49:05 +00:00
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