Re: LWLock deadlock and gdb advice - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 06/30/2015 11:24 PM, Andres Freund wrote:

On 2015-06-30 22:19:02 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

Hm. Right. A recheck of the value after the queuing should be sufficient
to fix? That's how we deal with the exact same scenarios for the normal
lock state, so that shouldn't be very hard to add.

Yeah. It's probably more efficient to not release the spinlock between
checking the value and LWLockQueueSelf() though.

Right now LWLockQueueSelf() takes spinlocks etc itself, and is used that
way in a bunch of callsites... So that'd be harder.  Additionally I'm
planning to get rid of the spinlocks around queuing (they show up as
bottlenecks in contended workloads), so it seems more future proof not
to assume that either way.  On top of that I think we should, when
available (or using the same type of fallback as for 32bit?), use 64 bit
atomics for the var anyway.

I'll take a stab at fixing this tomorrow.

Thanks! Do you mean both or "just" the second issue?

Both. Here's the patch.

Previously, LWLockAcquireWithVar set the variable associated with the lock atomically with acquiring it. Before the lwlock-scalability changes, that was straightforward because you held the spinlock anyway, but it's a lot harder/expensive now. So I changed the way acquiring a lock with a variable works. There is now a separate flag, LW_FLAG_VAR_SET, which indicates that the current lock holder has updated the variable. The LWLockAcquireWithVar function is gone - you now just use LWLockAcquire(), which always clears the LW_FLAG_VAR_SET flag, and you can call LWLockUpdateVar() after that if you want to set the variable immediately. LWLockWaitForVar() always waits if the flag is not set, i.e. it will not return regardless of the variable's value, if the current lock-holder has not updated it yet.

This passes make check, but I haven't done any testing beyond that. Does this look sane to you?