The error message now makes explicit reference to the GUC that must be changed
to fix the problem, using wording suggested by Tom Lane.  Along the way,
rename the GUC from MaxWalSenders to max_wal_senders for consistency and
grep-ability.

by a superuser -- "ALTER USER f RESET setting" already disallows removing such a
setting.

Apply the same treatment to ALTER DATABASE d RESET ALL when run by a database
owner that's not superuser.

how often we do SSL session key renegotiation. Can be set to
0 to disable renegotiation completely, which is required if
a broken SSL library is used (broken patches to CVE-2009-3555
a known cause) or when using a client library that can't do
renegotiation.

(hope I got 'em all).  Per discussion, this release will be 9.0 not 8.5.

process. If startup waits on a buffer pin we send a request to all
backends to cancel themselves if they are holding the buffer pin
required and they are also waiting on a lock. If not, startup waits
until max_standby_delay before cancelling any backend waiting for
the requested buffer pin.

false positives during Hot Standby conflict processing. Simple
patch to enhance conflict processing, following previous discussions.
Controlled by parameter minimize_standby_conflicts = on | off, with
default off allows measurement of performance impact to see whether
it should be set on all the time.

default of "plpgsql".  This is more reasonable than it was when the DO patch
was written, because we have since decided that plpgsql should be installed
by default.  Per discussion, having a parameter for this doesn't seem useful
enough to justify the risk of application breakage if the value is changed
unexpectedly.

AbortTransaction or AbortSubTransaction, when trying to clean up after an
error that prevented (sub)transaction start from completing:
* access to TopTransactionResourceOwner that might not exist
* assert failure in AtEOXact_GUC, if AtStart_GUC not called yet
* assert failure or core dump in AfterTriggerEndSubXact, if
  AfterTriggerBeginSubXact not called yet

Per testing by injecting elog(ERROR) at successive steps in StartTransaction
and StartSubTransaction.  It's not clear whether all of these cases could
really occur in the field, but at least one of them is easily exposed by
simple stress testing, as per my accidental discovery yesterday.

woken by alarm we send SIGUSR1 to all backends requesting that they
check to see if they are blocking Startup process. If so, they throw
ERROR/FATAL as for other conflict resolutions. Deadlock stop gap
removed. max_standby_delay = -1 option removed to prevent deadlock.

This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.

Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.

Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.

Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me

we're not going to support that anymore.

I did keep the 64-bit-CRC-with-32-bit-arithmetic code, since it has a
performance excuse to live.  It's a bit moot since that's all ifdef'd
out, of course.

This is more in keeping with modern practice, and is a first step towards
porting to Win64 (which has sizeof(pointer) > sizeof(long)).

Tsutomu Yamada, Magnus Hagander, Tom Lane

Rewrite or adjust various comments for clarity.  Remove one bogus comment that
doesn't reflect what the code actually does.  Improve the description of the
lo_compat_privileges option.

Enabled by recovery_connections = on (default) and forcing archive recovery using a recovery.conf. Recovery processing now emulates the original transactions as they are replayed, providing full locking and MVCC behaviour for read only queries. Recovery must enter consistent state before connections are allowed, so there is a delay, typically short, before connections succeed. Replay of recovering transactions can conflict and in some cases deadlock with queries during recovery; these result in query cancellation after max_standby_delay seconds have expired. Infrastructure changes have minor effects on normal running, though introduce four new types of WAL record.

New test mode "make standbycheck" allows regression tests of static command behaviour on a standby server while in recovery. Typical and extreme dynamic behaviours have been checked via code inspection and manual testing. Few port specific behaviours have been utilised, though primary testing has been on Linux only so far.

This commit is the basic patch. Additional changes will follow in this release to enhance some aspects of behaviour, notably improved handling of conflicts, deadlock detection and query cancellation. Changes to VACUUM FULL are also required.

Simon Riggs, with significant and lengthy review by Heikki Linnakangas, including streamlined redesign of snapshot creation and two-phase commit.

Important contributions from Florian Pflug, Mark Kirkwood, Merlin Moncure, Greg Stark, Gianni Ciolli, Gabriele Bartolini, Hannu Krosing, Robert Haas, Tatsuo Ishii, Hiroyuki Yamada plus support and feedback from many other community members.

A new system catalog pg_largeobject_metadata manages
ownership and access privileges of large objects.

KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Jaime Casanova.

an allegedly immutable index function.  It was previously recognized that
we had to prevent such a function from executing SET/RESET ROLE/SESSION
AUTHORIZATION, or it could trivially obtain the privileges of the session
user.  However, since there is in general no privilege checking for changes
of session-local state, it is also possible for such a function to change
settings in a way that might subvert later operations in the same session.
Examples include changing search_path to cause an unexpected function to
be called, or replacing an existing prepared statement with another one
that will execute a function of the attacker's choosing.

The present patch secures VACUUM, ANALYZE, and CREATE INDEX/REINDEX against
these threats, which are the same places previously deemed to need protection
against the SET ROLE issue.  GUC changes are still allowed, since there are
many useful cases for that, but we prevent security problems by forcing a
rollback of any GUC change after completing the operation.  Other cases are
handled by throwing an error if any change is attempted; these include temp
table creation, closing a cursor, and creating or deleting a prepared
statement.  (In 7.4, the infrastructure to roll back GUC changes doesn't
exist, so we settle for rejecting changes of "search_path" in these contexts.)

Original report and patch by Gurjeet Singh, additional analysis by
Tom Lane.

Security: CVE-2009-4136

to the client by the server.  This might seem pretty pointless but apparently
it will help pgbouncer, and perhaps other connection poolers.  Anyway it's
practically free to do so for the normal use-case where appname is only set
in the startup packet --- we're just adding a few more bytes to the initial
ParameterStatus response packet.  Per comments from Marko Kreen.

pg_stat_activity and recorded in log entries.

Dave Page, reviewed by Andres Freund

style by default.  Per discussion, there seems to be hardly anything that
really relies on being able to change the regex flavor, so the ability to
select it via embedded options ought to be enough for any stragglers.
Also, if we didn't remove the GUC, we'd really be morally obligated to
mark the regex functions non-immutable, which'd possibly create performance
issues.

Per recent discussion, add_missing_from has been deprecated for long enough to
consider removing, and it's getting in the way of planned parser refactoring.
The system now always behaves as though add_missing_from were OFF.

last week.

Per note and patch from Jeff Davis.

settings: avoid calling superuser() in contexts where it's not defined,
don't leak the transient copies of GetConfigOption output, and avoid the
whole exercise in postmaster child processes.

I found that actually no current caller of GetConfigOption has any use for
its internal check of GUC_SUPERUSER_ONLY.  But rather than just remove
that entirely, it seemed better to add a parameter indicating whether to
enforce the check.

Per report from Simon and subsequent testing.

to create a function for it.

Procedural languages now have an additional entry point, namely a function
to execute an inline code block.  This seemed a better design than trying
to hide the transient-ness of the code from the PL.  As of this patch, only
plpgsql has an inline handler, but probably people will soon write handlers
for the other standard PLs.

In passing, remove the long-dead LANCOMPILER option of CREATE LANGUAGE.

Petr Jelinek

ignored because it can only be set at server start.  In particular,
hiding the main reason in the detail message was suboptimal.

use that value when the backend is new enough to allow it.  This responds
to bug report from Keh-Cheng Chu pointing out that although 2 extra digits
should be sufficient to dump and restore float8 exactly, it is possible to
need 3 extra digits for float4 values.

build actually attempts to advertise itself via Bonjour.  Formerly it always
did so, which meant that packagers had to decide for their users whether
this behavior was wanted or not.  The default is "off" to be on the safe
side, though this represents a change in the default behavior of a
Bonjour-enabled build.  Per discussion.

functions.

This extends the previous patch that forbade SETting these variables inside
security-definer functions.  RESET is equally a security hole, since it
would allow regaining privileges of the caller; furthermore it can trigger
Assert failures and perhaps other internal errors, since the code is not
expecting these variables to change in such contexts.  The previous patch
did not cover this case because assign hooks don't really have enough
information, so move the responsibility for preventing this into guc.c.

Problem discovered by Heikki Linnakangas.

Security: no CVE assigned yet, extends CVE-2007-6600

via the "flat files" facility.  This requires making it enough like a backend
to be able to run transactions; it's no longer an "auxiliary process" but
more like the autovacuum worker processes.  Also, its signal handling has
to be brought into line with backends/workers.  In particular, since it
now has to handle procsignal.c processing, the special autovac-launcher-only
signal conditions are moved to SIGUSR2.

Alvaro, with some cleanup from Tom

XID) in checkpoint records.  This eliminates the need to recompute the value
from scratch during database startup, which is one of the two remaining
reasons for the flatfile code to exist.  It should also simplify life for
hot-standby operation.

To avoid bloating the checkpoint records unreasonably, I switched from
tracking the oldest database by name to tracking it by OID.  This turns
out to save cycles in general (everywhere but the warning-generating
paths, which we hardly care about) and also helps us deal with the case
that the oldest database got dropped instead of being vacuumed.  The prior
coding might go for a long time without updating the wrap limit in that case,
which is bad because it might result in a lot of useless autovacuum activity.

(That flat file is now completely useless, but removal will come later.)

To do this, postpone client authentication into the startup transaction
that's run by InitPostgres.  We still collect the startup packet and do
SSL initialization (if needed) at the same time we did before.  The
AuthenticationTimeout is applied separately to startup packet collection
and the actual authentication cycle.  (This is a bit annoying, since it
means a couple extra syscalls; but the signal handling requirements inside
and outside a transaction are sufficiently different that it seems best
to treat the timeouts as completely independent.)

A small security disadvantage is that if the given database name is invalid,
this will be reported to the client before any authentication happens.
We could work around that by connecting to database "postgres" instead,
but consensus seems to be that it's not worth introducing such surprising
behavior.

Processing of all command-line switches and GUC options received from the
client is now postponed until after authentication.  This means that
PostAuthDelay is much less useful than it used to be --- if you need to
investigate problems during InitPostgres you'll have to set PreAuthDelay
instead.  However, allowing an unauthenticated user to set any GUC options
whatever seems a bit too risky, so we'll live with that.

Instead of sending stdout/stderr to /dev/null after forking away from the
terminal, send them to postmaster.log within the data directory.  Since
this opens the door to indefinite logfile bloat, recommend even more
strongly that log output be redirected when using silent_mode.

Move the postmaster's initial calls of load_hba() and load_ident() down
to after we have started the log collector, if we are going to.  This
is so that errors reported by them will appear in the "usual" place.

Reclassify silent_mode as a LOGGING_WHERE, not LOGGING_WHEN, parameter,
since it's got absolutely nothing to do with the latter category.

In passing, fix some obsolete references to -S ... this option hasn't
had that switch letter for a long time.

Back-patch to 8.4, since as of 8.4 load_hba() and load_ident() are more
picky (and thus more likely to fail) than they used to be.  This entire
change was driven by a complaint about those errors disappearing into
the bit bucket.

Both hex format and the traditional "escape" format are automatically
handled on input.  The output format is selected by the new GUC variable
bytea_output.

As committed, bytea_output defaults to HEX, which is an *incompatible
change*.  We will keep it this way for awhile for testing purposes, but
should consider whether to switch to the more backwards-compatible
default of ESCAPE before 8.5 is released.

Peter Eisentraut

so it doesn't go through BuildTupleFromCStrings.  This is more or less a
wash for current uses, but will avoid inefficiency for planned changes to
EXPLAIN.

Robert Haas

random number seed each time.  This is how it used to work years ago, but
we got rid of the seed reset because it was resetting the main random()
sequence and thus having undesirable effects on the rest of the system.
To fix, establish a private random number state for each execution of
geqo(), and initialize the state using the new GUC variable geqo_seed.
People who want to experiment with different random searches can do so
by changing geqo_seed, but you'll always get the same plan for the same
value of geqo_seed (if holding all other planner inputs constant, of course).

The new state is kept in PlannerInfo by adding a "void *" field reserved
for use by join_search hooks.  Most of the rather bulky code changes in
this commit are just arranging to pass PlannerInfo around to all the GEQO
functions (many of which formerly didn't receive it).

Andres Freund, with some editorialization by Tom

This alters various incidental uses of C++ key words to use other similar
identifiers, so that a C++ compiler won't choke outright.  You still
(probably) need extern "C" { }; around the inclusion of backend headers.

based on a patch by Kurt Harriman <harriman@acm.org>

Also add a script cpluspluscheck to check for C++ compatibility in the
future.  As of right now, this passes without error for me.