for the SLRU race condition that I posted a few days ago, but we decided
not to use in 8.1 and older branches.

to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc.  It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.)  Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine.  Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.

chdir into PGDATA and subsequently use relative paths instead of absolute
paths to access all files under PGDATA.  This seems to give a small
performance improvement, and it should make the system more robust
against naive DBAs doing things like moving a database directory that
has a live postmaster in it.  Per recent discussion.

Tag appropriate files for rc3

Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...

updates are no longer WAL-logged nor even fsync'd; we do not need to,
since after a crash no old pg_subtrans data is needed again.  We truncate
pg_subtrans to RecentGlobalXmin at each checkpoint.  slru.c's API is
refactored a little bit to separate out the necessary decisions.

performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.

Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.

explicitly fsync'ing every (non-temp) file we have written since the
last checkpoint.  In the vast majority of cases, the burden of the
fsyncs should fall on the bgwriter process not on backends.  (To this
end, we assume that an fsync issued by the bgwriter will force out
blocks written to the same file by other processes using other file
descriptors.  Anyone have a problem with that?)  This makes the world
safe for WIN32, which ain't even got sync(2), and really makes the world
safe for Unixen as well, because sync(2) never had the semantics we need:
it offers no way to wait for the requested I/O to finish.

Along the way, fix a bug I recently introduced in xlog recovery:
file truncation replay failed to clear bufmgr buffers for the dropped
blocks, which could result in 'PANIC:  heap_delete_redo: no block'
later on in xlog replay.

about a third, make it work on non-Windows platforms again.  (But perhaps
I broke the WIN32 code, since I have no way to test that.)  Fold all the
paths that fork postmaster child processes to go through the single
routine SubPostmasterMain, which takes care of resurrecting the state that
would normally be inherited from the postmaster (including GUC variables).
Clean up some places where there's no particularly good reason for the
EXEC and non-EXEC cases to work differently.  Take care of one or two
FIXMEs that remained in the code.

make sure the $Id tags are converted to $PostgreSQL as well ...

least-recently-used strategy from clog.c into slru.c.  It doesn't
change any visible behaviour and passes all regression tests plus a
TruncateCLOG test done manually.

Apart from refactoring I made a little change to SlruRecentlyUsed,
formerly ClogRecentlyUsed:  It now skips incrementing lru_counts, if
slotno is already the LRU slot, thus saving a few CPU cycles.  To make
this work, lru_counts are initialised to 1 in SimpleLruInit.

SimpleLru will be used by pg_subtrans (part of the nested transactions
project), so the main purpose of this patch is to avoid future code
duplication.

Manfred Koizar