On 21/02/2023 18:33, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
On 2023-Feb-21, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

+static BlockNumber
+BulkExtendSharedRelationBuffered(Relation rel,
+                                                                SMgrRelation 
smgr,
+                                                                bool 
skip_extension_lock,
+                                                                char 
relpersistence,
+                                                                ForkNumber 
fork, ReadBufferMode mode,
+                                                                
BufferAccessStrategy strategy,
+                                                                uint32 
*num_pages,
+                                                                uint32 
num_locked_pages,
+                                                                Buffer 
*buffers)

Ugh, that's a lot of arguments, some are inputs and some are outputs. I
don't have any concrete suggestions, but could we simplify this somehow?
Needs a comment at least.

Yeah, I noticed this too.  I think it would be easy enough to add a new
struct that can be passed as a pointer, which can be stack-allocated
by the caller, and which holds the input arguments that are common to
both functions, as is sensible.

We also do this in freespace.c and visibilitymap.c:

    /* Extend as needed. */
    while (fsm_nblocks_now < fsm_nblocks)
    {
        PageSetChecksumInplace((Page) pg.data, fsm_nblocks_now);

        smgrextend(reln, FSM_FORKNUM, fsm_nblocks_now,
                   pg.data, false);
        fsm_nblocks_now++;
     }

We could use the new smgrzeroextend function here. But it would be better to go through the buffer cache, because after this, the last block, at 'fsm_nblocks', will be read with ReadBuffer() and modified.

We could use BulkExtendSharedRelationBuffered() to extend the relation and keep the last page locked, but the BulkExtendSharedRelationBuffered() signature doesn't allow that. It can return the first N pages locked, but there's no way to return the *last* page locked.

Perhaps we should decompose this function into several function calls. Something like:

/* get N victim buffers, pinned and !BM_VALID */
buffers = BeginExtendRelation(int npages);

LockRelationForExtension(rel)

/* Insert buffers into buffer table */
first_blk = smgrnblocks()
for (blk = first_blk; blk < last_blk; blk++)
    MapNewBuffer(blk, buffers[i])

/* extend the file on disk */
smgrzeroextend();

UnlockRelationForExtension(rel)

for (blk = first_blk; blk < last_blk; blk++)
{
    memset(BufferGetPage(buffers[i]), 0,
    FinishNewBuffer(buffers[i])
    /* optionally lock the buffer */
    LockBuffer(buffers[i]);
}

That's a lot more verbose, of course, but gives the callers the flexibility. And might even be more readable than one function call with lots of arguments.

This would expose the concept of a buffer that's mapped but marked as IO-in-progress outside bufmgr.c. On one hand, maybe that's exposing details that shouldn't be exposed. On the other hand, it might come handy. Instead of RBM_ZERO_AND_LOCK mode, for example, it might be handy to have a function that returns an IO-in-progress buffer that you can initialize any way you want.

- Heikki



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