Re: Minimal logical decoding on standbys

Hi,

On 12/14/22 6:48 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 12:35 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
>>>   typedef struct xl_heap_prune
>>>
>>> I think this is unsafe on alignment-picky machines. I think it will
>>> cause the offset numbers to be aligned at an odd address.
>>> heap_xlog_prune() doesn't copy the data into aligned memory, so I
>>> think this will result in a misaligned pointer being passed down to
>>> heap_page_prune_execute.
>>
>> I think the offset numbers are stored separately from the record, even
>> though it doesn't quite look like that in the above due to the way the
>> 'OFFSET NUMBERS' is embedded in the struct. As they're stored with the
>> block reference 0, the added boolean shouldn't make a difference
>> alignment wise?
>>
>> Or am I misunderstanding your point?
> 
> Oh, you're right. So this is another case similar to
> xl_btree_reuse_page. In heap_xlog_prune(), we access the offset number
> data like this:
> 
>                  redirected = (OffsetNumber *)
> XLogRecGetBlockData(record, 0, &datalen);
>                  end = (OffsetNumber *) ((char *) redirected + datalen);
>                  nowdead = redirected + (nredirected * 2);
>                  nowunused = nowdead + ndead;
>                  nunused = (end - nowunused);
>                  heap_page_prune_execute(buffer,
> 
> redirected, nredirected,
>                                                                  nowdead, ndead,
> 
> nowunused, nunused);
> 
> This is only safe if the return value of XLogRecGetBlockData is
> guaranteed to be properly aligned,

Why, could you please elaborate?

It looks to me that here we are "just" accessing the
members of the xl_heap_prune struct to get the numbers.

Then, the actual data will be read later in heap_page_prune_execute() from the buffer/page based on the numbers we got
fromxl_heap_prune.
 

Regards,

-- 
Bertrand Drouvot
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com