From c98605cc47fe42fac5f685d611db2a0c1afa2fcf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Robert Haas
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2015 12:05:38 -0500
Subject: 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.
---
 doc/src/sgml/bgworker.sgml | 8 ++++++++
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)

(limited to 'doc/src')

diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/bgworker.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/bgworker.sgml
index ef28f725114..33ff5269516 100644
--- a/doc/src/sgml/bgworker.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/bgworker.sgml
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@ 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];
     int         bgw_notify_pid;
 } BackgroundWorker;
 </programlisting>
@@ -136,6 +137,13 @@ typedef struct BackgroundWorker
    <structfield>bgw_main</structfield> is NULL.
   </para>
 
+  <para>
+   <structfield>bgw_extra</structfield> can contain extra data to be passed
+   to the background worker.  Unlike <structfield>bgw_main_arg</>, this data
+   is not passed as an argument to the worker's main function, but it can be
+   accessed via <literal>MyBgworkerEntry</literal>, as discussed above.
+  </para>
+
   <para>
    <structfield>bgw_notify_pid</structfield> is the PID of a PostgreSQL
    backend process to which the postmaster should send <literal>SIGUSR1</>
-- 
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