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

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> It's the lock-upgrade problem I theorized about
> upthread. ReindexIndex(), via RangeVarCallbackForReindexIndex(), takes a
> ShareLock on pg_class, and then goes on to upgrade to RowExclusiveLock
> in RelationSetNewRelfilenode(). But at that time another session
> obviously can already have the ShareLock and would also want to upgrade.

Hmm. Note that this is totally independent of the deadlock mechanism
I reported in my last message on this thread.

I also wonder whether clobber-cache testing would expose cases
we haven't seen that trace to the additional catalog accesses
caused by cache reloads.

> I'm not sure it's worth fixing this.

I am not sure it's even *possible* to fix all these cases. Even
if we could, it's out of scope for v12 let alone the back branches.

I think the only practical solution is to remove those reindex tests.
Even if we ran them in a script with no concurrent scripts, there'd
be risk of failures against autovacuum, I'm afraid. Not often, but
often enough to be annoying.

Possibly we could run them in a TAP test that configures a cluster
with autovac disabled?

regards, tom lane