Fix WAL replay in presence of an incomplete record

Physical replication always ships WAL segment files to replicas once
they are complete.  This is a problem if one WAL record is split across
a segment boundary and the primary server crashes before writing down
the segment with the next portion of the WAL record: WAL writing after
crash recovery would happily resume at the point where the broken record
started, overwriting that record ... but any standby or backup may have
already received a copy of that segment, and they are not rewinding.
This causes standbys to stop following the primary after the latter
crashes:
  LOG:  invalid contrecord length 7262 at A8/D9FFFBC8
because the standby is still trying to read the continuation record
(contrecord) for the original long WAL record, but it is not there and
it will never be.  A workaround is to stop the replica, delete the WAL
file, and restart it -- at which point a fresh copy is brought over from
the primary.  But that's pretty labor intensive, and I bet many users
would just give up and re-clone the standby instead.

A fix for this problem was already attempted in commit 515e3d84a0b5, but
it only addressed the case for the scenario of WAL archiving, so
streaming replication would still be a problem (as well as other things
such as taking a filesystem-level backup while the server is down after
having crashed), and it had performance scalability problems too; so it
had to be reverted.

This commit fixes the problem using an approach suggested by Andres
Freund, whereby the initial portion(s) of the split-up WAL record are
kept, and a special type of WAL record is written where the contrecord
was lost, so that WAL replay in the replica knows to skip the broken
parts.  With this approach, we can continue to stream/archive segment
files as soon as they are complete, and replay of the broken records
will proceed across the crash point without a hitch.

Because a new type of WAL record is added, users should be careful to
upgrade standbys first, primaries later. Otherwise they risk the standby
being unable to start if the primary happens to write such a record.

A new TAP test that exercises this is added, but the portability of it
is yet to be seen.

This has been wrong since the introduction of physical replication, so
backpatch all the way back.  In stable branches, keep the new
XLogReaderState members at the end of the struct, to avoid an ABI
break.

Author: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
Reviewed-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Nathan Bossart <bossartn@amazon.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/202108232252.dh7uxf6oxwcy@alvherre.pgsql

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/access/xlog_internal.h b/src/include/access/xlog_internal.h
index 26a743b6b6c..dcf41e9257c 100644
--- a/src/include/access/xlog_internal.h
+++ b/src/include/access/xlog_internal.h
@@ -76,8 +76,10 @@ typedef XLogLongPageHeaderData *XLogLongPageHeader;
 #define XLP_LONG_HEADER				0x0002
 /* This flag indicates backup blocks starting in this page are optional */
 #define XLP_BKP_REMOVABLE			0x0004
+/* Replaces a missing contrecord; see CreateOverwriteContrecordRecord */
+#define XLP_FIRST_IS_OVERWRITE_CONTRECORD 0x0008
 /* All defined flag bits in xlp_info (used for validity checking of header) */
-#define XLP_ALL_FLAGS				0x0007
+#define XLP_ALL_FLAGS				0x000F
 
 #define XLogPageHeaderSize(hdr)		\
 	(((hdr)->xlp_info & XLP_LONG_HEADER) ? SizeOfXLogLongPHD : SizeOfXLogShortPHD)
@@ -249,6 +251,13 @@ typedef struct xl_restore_point
 	char		rp_name[MAXFNAMELEN];
 } xl_restore_point;
 
+/* Overwrite of prior contrecord */
+typedef struct xl_overwrite_contrecord
+{
+	XLogRecPtr	overwritten_lsn;
+	TimestampTz overwrite_time;
+} xl_overwrite_contrecord;
+
 /* End of recovery mark, when we don't do an END_OF_RECOVERY checkpoint */
 typedef struct xl_end_of_recovery
 {