Re: eliminate xl_heap_visible to reduce WAL (and eventually set VM on-access)

On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 00:02, Melanie Plageman
<melanieplageman(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> > Do we need to pin vmbuffer here? Looks like
> > XLogReadBufferForRedoExtended already pins vmbuffer. I verified this
> > with CheckBufferIsPinnedOnce(vmbuffer) just before visibilitymap_pin
> > and COPY ... WITH (FREEZE true) test.
>
> I thought the reason visibilitymap_set() did it was that it was
> possible for the block of the VM corresponding to the block of the
> heap to be different during recovery than it was when emitting the
> record, and thus we needed the part of visiblitymap_pin() that
> released the old vmbuffer and got the new one corresponding to the
> heap block.
>
> I can't quite think of how this could happen though.
>
> Assuming it can't happen, then we can get rid of visiblitymap_pin()
> (and add visibilitymap_pin_ok()) in both visiblitymap_set_vmbyte() and
> visibilitymap_set(). I've done this to visibilitymap_set() in a
> separate patch 0001. I would like other opinions/confirmation that the
> block of the VM corresponding to the heap block cannot differ during
> recovery from that what it was when the record was emitted during
> normal operation, though.

I did micro git-blame research here. I spotted only one related change
[0]. Looks like before this change pin was indeed needed.
But not after this change, so this visibilitymap_pin is just an oversight?
Related thread is [1]. I quickly checked the discussion in this
thread, and it looks like no one was bothered about these lines or VM
logging changes (in this exact pin buffer aspect). The discussion was
of other aspects of this commit.

[0] https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/2c03216d8311
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/533D6CBF.6080203%40vmware.com

--
Best regards,
Kirill Reshke