Re: REINDEX INDEX results in a crash for an index of pg_class since 9.6

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 10:14:30AM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> Doing a REINDEX TABLE directly on pg_class proves to work correctly,
> and CONCURRENTLY is not supported for catalog tables.
>
> Bisecting my way through it, the first commit causing the breakage is
> that:
> commit: 01e386a325549b7755739f31308de4be8eea110d
> author: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> date: Wed, 23 Dec 2015 20:09:01 -0500
> Avoid VACUUM FULL altogether in initdb.

This brings down to a first, simple, solution which is to issue a
VACUUM FULL on pg_class at the end of make_template0() in initdb.c to
avoid any subsequent problems if trying to issue a REINDEX on anything
related to pg_class, and it won't fix any existing deployments:
--- a/src/bin/initdb/initdb.c
+++ b/src/bin/initdb/initdb.c
@@ -2042,6 +2042,11 @@ make_template0(FILE *cmdfd)
* Finally vacuum to clean up dead rows in pg_database
*/
"VACUUM pg_database;\n\n",
+
+ /*
+ * And rebuild pg_class.
+ */
+ "VACUUM FULL pg_class;\n\n",
NULL
};
Now...

> The reason why this does not work is that CatalogIndexInsert() tries
> to do an index_insert directly on the index worked on. And the reason
> why this works at table level is that we have tweaks in
> reindex_relation() to enforce the list of valid indexes in the
> relation cache with RelationSetIndexList(). It seems to me that the
> logic in reindex_index() is wrong from the start, and that all the
> index list handling done in reindex_relation() should just be in
> reindex_index() so as REINDEX INDEX gets the right call.

I got to wonder if this dance with the relation cache is actually
necessary, because we could directly tell CatalogIndexInsert() to not
insert a tuple into an index which is bring rebuilt, and the index
rebuild would cause an entry to be added to pg_class anyway thanks to
RelationSetNewRelfilenode(). This can obviously only happen for
pg_class indexes.

Any thoughts about both approaches?
--
Michael