Thread: pgsql: Disallow LISTEN in background workers.

pgsql: Disallow LISTEN in background workers.

From
Tom Lane
Date:
Disallow LISTEN in background workers.

It's possible to execute user-defined SQL in some background processes;
for example, logical replication workers can fire triggers.  This opens
the possibility that someone would try to execute LISTEN in such a
context.  But since only regular backends ever call
ProcessNotifyInterrupt, no messages would actually be received, and
thus the registered listener would simply prevent the message queue
from being cleaned.  Eventually NOTIFY would stop working, which is bad.

Perhaps someday somebody will invent infrastructure to make listening
in a background worker actually useful.  In the meantime, forbid it.

Back-patch to v13, which is where we introduced the MyBackendType
variable.  It'd be a lot harder to implement the check without that,
and it doesn't seem worth the trouble.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/153243441449.1404.2274116228506175596@wrigleys.postgresql.org

Branch
------
REL_13_STABLE

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e06cc024bd3372cb4280246e114d7508e3e2c20a

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/tcop/utility.c | 17 +++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 17 insertions(+)