Pass extra data to bgworkers, and use this to fix parallel contexts.

Up until now, the total amount of data that could be passed to a
background worker at startup was one datum, which can be a small as
4 bytes on some systems.  That's enough to pass a dsm_handle or an
array index, but not much else.  Add a bgw_extra flag to the
BackgroundWorker struct, allowing up to 128 bytes to be passed to
a new worker on any platform.

Use this to fix a problem I recently discovered with the parallel
context machinery added in 9.5: the master assigns each worker an
array index, and each worker subsequently assigns itself an array
index, and there's nothing to guarantee that the two sets of indexes
match, leading to chaos.

Normally, I would not back-patch the change to add bgw_extra, since it
is basically a feature addition.  However, since 9.5 is still in beta
and there seems to be no other sensible way to repair the broken
parallel context machinery, back-patch to 9.5.  Existing background
worker code can ignore the bgw_extra field without a problem, but
might need to be recompiled since the structure size has changed.

Report and patch by me.  Review by Amit Kapila.

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/postmaster/bgworker.h b/src/include/postmaster/bgworker.h
index f0a95306545..6e0b5cd9fc8 100644
--- a/src/include/postmaster/bgworker.h
+++ b/src/include/postmaster/bgworker.h
@@ -74,6 +74,7 @@ typedef enum
 #define BGW_DEFAULT_RESTART_INTERVAL	60
 #define BGW_NEVER_RESTART				-1
 #define BGW_MAXLEN						64
+#define BGW_EXTRALEN					128
 
 typedef struct BackgroundWorker
 {
@@ -85,6 +86,7 @@ typedef struct BackgroundWorker
 	char		bgw_library_name[BGW_MAXLEN];	/* only if bgw_main is NULL */
 	char		bgw_function_name[BGW_MAXLEN];	/* only if bgw_main is NULL */
 	Datum		bgw_main_arg;
+	char		bgw_extra[BGW_EXTRALEN];
 	pid_t		bgw_notify_pid; /* SIGUSR1 this backend on start/stop */
 } BackgroundWorker;