Create a new dedicated Postgres process, "wal writer", which exists to write

and fsync WAL at convenient intervals.  For the moment it just tries to
offload this work from backends, but soon it will be responsible for
guaranteeing a maximum delay before asynchronously-committed transactions
will be flushed to disk.

This is a portion of Simon Riggs' async-commit patch, committed to CVS
separately because a background WAL writer seems like it might be a good idea
independently of the async-commit feature.  I rebased walwriter.c on
bgwriter.c because it seemed like a more appropriate way of handling signals;
while the startup/shutdown logic in postmaster.c is more like autovac because
we want walwriter to quit before we start the shutdown checkpoint.

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/postmaster/walwriter.h b/src/include/postmaster/walwriter.h
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..3cefe9ad7ba
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/include/postmaster/walwriter.h
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+/*-------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ *
+ * walwriter.h
+ *	  Exports from postmaster/walwriter.c.
+ *
+ * Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2007, PostgreSQL Global Development Group
+ *
+ * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/postmaster/walwriter.h,v 1.1 2007/07/24 04:54:09 tgl Exp $
+ *
+ *-------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ */
+#ifndef _WALWRITER_H
+#define _WALWRITER_H
+
+/* GUC options */
+extern int	WalWriterDelay;
+
+extern void WalWriterMain(void);
+
+#endif   /* _WALWRITER_H */