On Wed, Nov 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM Nathan Bossart <[email protected]> wrote: > Teach DSM registry to ERROR if attaching to an uninitialized entry. > > If DSM entry initialization fails, backends could try to use an > uninitialized DSM segment, DSA, or dshash table (since the entry is > still added to the registry). To fix, keep track of whether > initialization completed, and ERROR if a backend tries to attach to > an uninitialized entry. We could instead retry initialization as > needed, but that seemed complicated, error prone, and unlikely to > help most cases. Furthermore, such problems probably indicate a > coding error.
Having read the thread that led to this commit, I agree that this is an improvement, but it still doesn't seem like a great situation to me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like once the initialization has failed, there's no way to retry: you can't retry the initialization on the existing segment, and you can't delete it and create a new segment. If so, that means your only option for restoring proper function after an initialization failure is to bounce the entire server. Now, perhaps the chances of an initialization failure in practice are quite low. Maybe a typical initialization function won't do anything that could fail. But it just seems weird to me to design something that thinks errors are likely enough that it's worth having some amount of mechanism to deal with them, but unlikely enough that it's not worth making that mechanism more robust. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
