Introduce PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE and align all I/O buffers.

In order to have the option to use O_DIRECT/FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING in a
later commit, we need the addresses of user space buffers to be well
aligned.  The exact requirements vary by OS and file system (typically
sectors and/or memory pages).  The address alignment size is set to
4096, which is enough for currently known systems: it matches modern
sectors and common memory page size.  There is no standard governing
O_DIRECT's requirements so we might eventually have to reconsider this
with more information from the field or future systems.

Aligning I/O buffers on memory pages is also known to improve regular
buffered I/O performance.

Three classes of I/O buffers for regular data pages are adjusted:
(1) Heap buffers are now allocated with the new palloc_aligned() or
MemoryContextAllocAligned() functions introduced by commit 439f6175.
(2) Stack buffers now use a new struct PGIOAlignedBlock to respect
PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE, if possible with this compiler.  (3) The buffer
pool is also aligned in shared memory.

WAL buffers were already aligned on XLOG_BLCKSZ.  It's possible for
XLOG_BLCKSZ to be configured smaller than PG_IO_ALIGNED_SIZE and thus
for O_DIRECT WAL writes to fail to be well aligned, but that's a
pre-existing condition and will be addressed by a later commit.

BufFiles are not yet addressed (there's no current plan to use O_DIRECT
for those, but they could potentially get some incidental speedup even
in plain buffered I/O operations through better alignment).

If we can't align stack objects suitably using the compiler extensions
we know about, we disable the use of O_DIRECT by setting PG_O_DIRECT to
0.  This avoids the need to consider systems that have O_DIRECT but
can't align stack objects the way we want; such systems could in theory
be supported with more work but we don't currently know of any such
machines, so it's easier to pretend there is no O_DIRECT support
instead.  That's an existing and tested class of system.

Add assertions that all buffers passed into smgrread(), smgrwrite() and
smgrextend() are correctly aligned, unless PG_O_DIRECT is 0 (= stack
alignment tricks may be unavailable) or the block size has been set too
small to allow arrays of buffers to be all aligned.

Author: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+hUKGK1X532hYqJ_MzFWt0n1zt8trz980D79WbjwnT-yYLZpg@mail.gmail.com

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/storage/buffer/buf_init.c b/src/backend/storage/buffer/buf_init.c
index 20946c47cb4..0057443f0c6 100644
--- a/src/backend/storage/buffer/buf_init.c
+++ b/src/backend/storage/buffer/buf_init.c
@@ -78,9 +78,12 @@ InitBufferPool(void)
 						NBuffers * sizeof(BufferDescPadded),
 						&foundDescs);
 
+	/* Align buffer pool on IO page size boundary. */
 	BufferBlocks = (char *)
-		ShmemInitStruct("Buffer Blocks",
-						NBuffers * (Size) BLCKSZ, &foundBufs);
+		TYPEALIGN(PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE,
+				  ShmemInitStruct("Buffer Blocks",
+								  NBuffers * (Size) BLCKSZ + PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE,
+								  &foundBufs));
 
 	/* Align condition variables to cacheline boundary. */
 	BufferIOCVArray = (ConditionVariableMinimallyPadded *)
@@ -163,7 +166,8 @@ BufferShmemSize(void)
 	/* to allow aligning buffer descriptors */
 	size = add_size(size, PG_CACHE_LINE_SIZE);
 
-	/* size of data pages */
+	/* size of data pages, plus alignment padding */
+	size = add_size(size, PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE);
 	size = add_size(size, mul_size(NBuffers, BLCKSZ));
 
 	/* size of stuff controlled by freelist.c */