Introduce PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE and align all I/O buffers.

In order to have the option to use O_DIRECT/FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING in a
later commit, we need the addresses of user space buffers to be well
aligned.  The exact requirements vary by OS and file system (typically
sectors and/or memory pages).  The address alignment size is set to
4096, which is enough for currently known systems: it matches modern
sectors and common memory page size.  There is no standard governing
O_DIRECT's requirements so we might eventually have to reconsider this
with more information from the field or future systems.

Aligning I/O buffers on memory pages is also known to improve regular
buffered I/O performance.

Three classes of I/O buffers for regular data pages are adjusted:
(1) Heap buffers are now allocated with the new palloc_aligned() or
MemoryContextAllocAligned() functions introduced by commit 439f6175.
(2) Stack buffers now use a new struct PGIOAlignedBlock to respect
PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE, if possible with this compiler.  (3) The buffer
pool is also aligned in shared memory.

WAL buffers were already aligned on XLOG_BLCKSZ.  It's possible for
XLOG_BLCKSZ to be configured smaller than PG_IO_ALIGNED_SIZE and thus
for O_DIRECT WAL writes to fail to be well aligned, but that's a
pre-existing condition and will be addressed by a later commit.

BufFiles are not yet addressed (there's no current plan to use O_DIRECT
for those, but they could potentially get some incidental speedup even
in plain buffered I/O operations through better alignment).

If we can't align stack objects suitably using the compiler extensions
we know about, we disable the use of O_DIRECT by setting PG_O_DIRECT to
0.  This avoids the need to consider systems that have O_DIRECT but
can't align stack objects the way we want; such systems could in theory
be supported with more work but we don't currently know of any such
machines, so it's easier to pretend there is no O_DIRECT support
instead.  That's an existing and tested class of system.

Add assertions that all buffers passed into smgrread(), smgrwrite() and
smgrextend() are correctly aligned, unless PG_O_DIRECT is 0 (= stack
alignment tricks may be unavailable) or the block size has been set too
small to allow arrays of buffers to be all aligned.

Author: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+hUKGK1X532hYqJ_MzFWt0n1zt8trz980D79WbjwnT-yYLZpg@mail.gmail.com

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index 46821ad6056..a5c74fdab8c 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -4506,7 +4506,7 @@ XLOGShmemSize(void)
 	/* xlblocks array */
 	size = add_size(size, mul_size(sizeof(XLogRecPtr), XLOGbuffers));
 	/* extra alignment padding for XLOG I/O buffers */
-	size = add_size(size, XLOG_BLCKSZ);
+	size = add_size(size, Max(XLOG_BLCKSZ, PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE));
 	/* and the buffers themselves */
 	size = add_size(size, mul_size(XLOG_BLCKSZ, XLOGbuffers));