Serializable Snapshot Isolation used for serializable transactions
depends on acquiring SIRead locks on all heap relation tuples which
are used to generate the query result, so that a later delete or
update of any of the tuples can flag a read-write conflict between
transactions. This is normally handled in heapam.c, with tuple level
locking. Since an index-only scan avoids heap access in many cases,
building the result from the index tuple, the necessary predicate
locks were not being acquired for all tuples in an index-only scan.
To prevent problems with tuple IDs which are vacuumed and re-used
while the transaction still matters, the xmin of the tuple is part of
the tag for the tuple lock. Since xmin is not available to the
index-only scan for result rows generated from the index tuples, it
is not possible to acquire a tuple-level predicate lock in such
cases, in spite of having the tid. If we went to the heap to get the
xmin value, it would no longer be an index-only scan. Rather than
prohibit index-only scans under serializable transaction isolation,
we acquire an SIRead lock on the page containing the tuple, when it
was not necessary to visit the heap for other reasons.