Replace existing durable_rename_excl() calls with durable_rename() durable_rename_excl() attempts to avoid overwriting any existing files by using link() and unlink(), falling back to rename() on some platforms (e.g., Windows where link() followed by unlink() is not concurrent-safe, see 909b449). Most callers of durable_rename_excl() use it just in case there is an existing file, but it happens that for all of them we never expect a target file to exist (WAL segment recycling, creation of timeline history file and basic_archive).
basic_archive used durable_rename_excl() to avoid overwriting an archive concurrently created by another server. Now, there is a stat() call to avoid overwriting an existing archive a couple of lines above, so note that this change opens a small TOCTOU window in this module between the stat() call and durable_rename(). Furthermore, as mentioned in the top comment of durable_rename_excl(), this routine can result in multiple hard links to the same file and data corruption, with two or more links to the same file in pg_wal/ if a crash happens before the unlink() call during WAL recycling. Specifically, this would produce links to the same file for the current WAL file and the next one because the half-recycled WAL file was re-recycled during crash recovery of a follow-up cluster restart. This change replaces all calls to durable_rename_excl() with durable_rename(). This removes the protection against accidentally overwriting an existing file, but some platforms are already living without it, and all those code paths never expect an existing file (a couple of assertions are added to check after that, in case). This is a bug fix, but knowing the unlikeliness of the problem involving one of more crashes at an exceptionally bad moment, no backpatch is done. This could be revisited in the future. Author: Nathan Bossart Reviewed-by: Robert Haas, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Michael Paquier Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220407182954.GA1231544@nathanxps13 Branch ------ master Details ------- https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ccfbd9287d70038518bdd3e85d7f5fd3dd1bb880 Modified Files -------------- contrib/basic_archive/basic_archive.c | 5 +++-- src/backend/access/transam/timeline.c | 18 ++++++------------ src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c | 10 ++++------ 3 files changed, 13 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-)