Re: Prevent crash when calling pgstat functions with unregistered stats kind

On Thu, Jul 02, 2026 at 04:23:16AM +0000, Bertrand Drouvot wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jul 02, 2026 at 01:10:18PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 02, 2026 at 04:06:01AM +0000, Bertrand Drouvot wrote:
> > > I agree that the responsibility should primarily be in the extension. However,
> > > the issue is that the NULL dereference happens inside core code (pgstat_prep_pending_entry,
> > > etc.), and the resulting segfault(s) cause the postmaster to terminate all
> > > backends (not just the offending session).
> > >
> > > Given that one misconfigured extension can crash all connections on the server,
> > > a defensive check in core seems reasonable (kind of similar to 341e9a05e7b).
> >
> > Nope, this was a different thing, doable in a couple of steps:
> > - Load the library.
> > - Write custom stats.
> > - Stop the server, flush the stats.
> > - Edit the configuration, not loading the library.
> > - Restart the server, loading failed.
> >
> > The problem of this thread ought to be blocked at its source, in the
> > extension itself: let's not give free hands to an extension to do what
> > it should not be allowed to do. There is a similar defense in
> > test_custom_rmgrs, as one example. We should just map to that.
>
> Ok but what about extensions that don't call pgstat_register_kind() at all? Your
> point is that they would see the issue during the development of the extension? (If
> so, I think I could agree).

Something like in the attached?

Regards,

--
Bertrand Drouvot
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com