Re: [HACKERS] Parallel tuplesort (for parallel B-Tree index creation)

On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 4:31 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 1:58 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
>> Not saying you're wrong, but you should include a comment on why this is
>> a benign warning. Presumably it's some padding memory somewhere, but
>> it's not obvious from the above bleat.
>
> Sure. This looks slightly more complicated than first anticipated, but
> I'll keep everyone posted.

I couldn't make up my mind if it was best to prevent the uninitialized
write(), or to instead just add a suppression. I eventually decided
upon the suppression -- see attached patch. My proposed commit message
has a full explanation of the Valgrind issue, which I won't repeat
here. Go read it before reading the rest of this e-mail.

It might seem like my suppression is overly broad, or not broad
enough, since it essentially targets LogicalTapeFreeze(). I don't
think it is, though, because this can occur in two places within
LogicalTapeFreeze() -- it can occur in the place we actually saw the
issue on lousyjack, from the ltsReadBlock() call within
LogicalTapeFreeze(), as well as a second place -- when
BufFileExportShared() is called. I found that you have to tweak code
to prevent it happening in the first place before you'll see it happen
in the second place. I see no point in actually playing whack-a-mole
for a totally benign issue like this, though, which made me finally
decide upon the suppression approach.

Bear in mind that a third way of fixing this would be to allocate
logtape.c buffers using palloc0() rather than palloc() (though I don't
like that idea at all). For serial external sorts, the logtape.c
buffers are guaranteed to have been written to/initialized at least
once as part of spilling a sort to disk. Parallel external sorts don't
quite guarantee that, which is why we run into this Valgrind issue.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan