It has been reported a null pointer dereference could be triggered in FreeConnParamsHashEntryFields. Likely cause is an error in GetConnParams which will leave the cached ConnParamsHashEntry in a state that would cause the null pointer dereference in a subsequent connection establishment to the same server. This has been simulated by inserting ereport(ERROR, ...) at certain places in the code.
Not only would ConnParamsHashEntry be in a state that would cause a crash, it was also leaking memory in the ConnectionContext due to the loss of pointers as they are only stored on the ConnParamsHashEntry at the end of the function.
This patch rewrites both the GetConnParams to store pointers 'durably' at every point in the code so that an error would not lose the pointer as well as FreeConnParamsHashEntryFields in a way that it can clear half initialised ConnParamsHashEntry's in a safer manner.
At configuration reload, we free all "global" (i.e. GUC-set) connection
parameters, but these may still have live references in the connection
parameters hash. By marking the entries as invalid, we can ensure they
will not be used after free.
Having DATA-segment string literals made blindly freeing the keywords/
values difficult, so I've switched to allocating all in the provided
context; because of this (and with the knowledge of the end point of
the global parameters), we can safely pfree non-global parameters when
we come across an invalid connection parameter entry.
To support more flexible (i.e. not at compile-time) specification of
libpq connection parameters, this change adds a new GUC, node_conninfo,
which must be a space-separated string of key-value pairs suitable for
parsing by libpq's connection establishment methods.
To avoid rebuilding and parsing these values at connection time, this
change also adds a cache in front of the configuration params to permit
immediate use of any previously-calculated parameters.