Joseph Shraibman reported some rather unpleasant behavior that
seems to be due to trying to drop a table whose FSM file has got
no permissions:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2011-12/msg00246.php
One question is how the file got that way, and whether Postgres did
anything wrong to cause it to not have permissions. But what I'm on the
warpath about now is the abysmally bad error response. What ought to
happen if we fail to delete a file during a DROP TABLE is a WARNING,
no more. Not a PANIC that recurs during crash recovery.
I tried to reproduce this, and found a different but equally bad
behavior:
regression=# create table foo as select * from tenk1;
SELECT 10000
regression=# delete from foo where unique1%10 = 0;
DELETE 1000
regression=# vacuum foo;
VACUUM
regression=# select 'foo'::regclass::oid; oid
-------52860
(1 row)
[ go and "chmod 000 52860_fsm" ]
regression=# drop table foo;
WARNING: AbortTransaction while in COMMIT state
ERROR: could not open file "base/27666/52860_fsm": Permission denied
PANIC: cannot abort transaction 7413, it was already committed
ERROR: could not open file "base/27666/52860_fsm": Permission denied
PANIC: cannot abort transaction 7413, it was already committed
The connection to the server was lost. Attempting reset: Failed.
I thought that removing the unreadable file would let me restart,
but after "rm 52860_fsm" and trying again to start the server,
there's a different problem:
LOG: database system was interrupted while in recovery at 2011-12-08 00:56:11 EST
HINT: This probably means that some data is corrupted and you will have to use the last backup for recovery.
LOG: database system was not properly shut down; automatic recovery in progress
LOG: consistent recovery state reached at 0/5D71BA8
LOG: redo starts at 0/5100050
WARNING: page 18 of relation base/27666/52860 is uninitialized
CONTEXT: xlog redo visible: rel 1663/27666/52860; blk 18
PANIC: WAL contains references to invalid pages
CONTEXT: xlog redo visible: rel 1663/27666/52860; blk 18
LOG: startup process (PID 14507) was terminated by signal 6
LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure
Note that this isn't even the same symptom Shraibman hit, since
apparently he was failing on replaying the commit record. How is it
that the main table file managed to have uninitialized pages?
I suspect that "redo visible" WAL processing is breaking one or more of
the fundamental WAL rules, perhaps by not generating a full-page image
when it needs to.
So this is really a whole lot worse than our behavior was in pre-FSM
days, and it needs to get fixed.
regards, tom lane
