Install a "dead man switch" to allow the postmaster to detect cases where

a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself
from shared memory.  We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is
loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go
through proc_exit() instead.  Also, it is reported that under Windows
there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code
returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit
(thank you, Microsoft).  If this does happen then the system is probably
hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks.
So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash.

The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it
acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released;
these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources
in a backend, or close enough anyway.  This choice means there is no
coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they
shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway.

This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND
ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs.

Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/miscadmin.h b/src/include/miscadmin.h
index 57ee0f93dd4..51649380d51 100644
--- a/src/include/miscadmin.h
+++ b/src/include/miscadmin.h
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2009, PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1994, Regents of the University of California
  *
- * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/miscadmin.h,v 1.209 2009/01/05 02:27:45 alvherre Exp $
+ * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/miscadmin.h,v 1.210 2009/05/05 19:59:00 tgl Exp $
  *
  * NOTES
  *	  some of the information in this file should be moved to other files.
@@ -137,6 +137,7 @@ extern PGDLLIMPORT int MyProcPid;
 extern PGDLLIMPORT pg_time_t MyStartTime;
 extern PGDLLIMPORT struct Port *MyProcPort;
 extern long MyCancelKey;
+extern int	MyPMChildSlot;
 
 extern char OutputFileName[];
 extern PGDLLIMPORT char my_exec_path[];