Defer restoration of libraries in parallel workers.

Several users of extensions complained of crashes in parallel workers
that turned out to be due to syscache access from their _PG_init()
functions.  Reorder the initialization of parallel workers so that
libraries are restored after the caches are initialized, and inside a
transaction.

This was reported in bug #15350 and elsewhere.  We don't consider it
to be a bug: extensions shouldn't do that, because then they can't be
used in shared_preload_libraries.  However, it's a fairly obscure
hazard and these extensions worked in practice before parallel query
came along.  So let's make it work.  Later commits might add a warning
message and eventually an error.

Back-patch to 9.6, where parallel query landed.

Author: Thomas Munro
Reviewed-by: Amit Kapila
Reported-by: Kieran McCusker, Jimmy
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/153512195228.1489.8545997741965926448%40wrigleys.postgresql.org

diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c b/src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c
index 1d631b727552cf235e3f00303e5574ca9c8cb6f2..a9edf7b9e882f5ccb09745cf046e10d8e0bbff9b 100644 (file)
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c
@@ -1303,14 +1303,6 @@ ParallelWorkerMain(Datum main_arg)
                                                           fps->parallel_master_pid))
                return;
 
-       /*
-        * Load libraries that were loaded by original backend.  We want to do
-        * this before restoring GUCs, because the libraries might define custom
-        * variables.
-        */
-       libraryspace = shm_toc_lookup(toc, PARALLEL_KEY_LIBRARY, false);
-       RestoreLibraryState(libraryspace);
-
        /*
         * Identify the entry point to be called.  In theory this could result in
         * loading an additional library, though most likely the entry point is in
@@ -1333,9 +1325,17 @@ ParallelWorkerMain(Datum main_arg)
         */
        SetClientEncoding(GetDatabaseEncoding());
 
+       /*
+        * Load libraries that were loaded by original backend.  We want to do
+        * this before restoring GUCs, because the libraries might define custom
+        * variables.
+        */
+       libraryspace = shm_toc_lookup(toc, PARALLEL_KEY_LIBRARY, false);
+       StartTransactionCommand();
+       RestoreLibraryState(libraryspace);
+
        /* Restore GUC values from launching backend. */
        gucspace = shm_toc_lookup(toc, PARALLEL_KEY_GUC, false);
-       StartTransactionCommand();
        RestoreGUCState(gucspace);
        CommitTransactionCommand();