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detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open, so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that. This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout, postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable. The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died, but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie). Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state. Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Florian Pflug.
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