Subject: pgsql: Fix race in ReplicationSlotRelease() for ephemeral slots

From: Fujii Masao <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:48:25 +0000

Fix race in ReplicationSlotRelease() for ephemeral slots

When releasing an ephemeral replication slot, ReplicationSlotRelease()
drops the slot via ReplicationSlotDropAcquired().

However, after dropping the slot, ReplicationSlotRelease() continued
to use its local "slot" pointer, which still referenced the dropped
slot's former shared-memory entry. It could then update fields such as
effective_xmin in that entry.

Once an ephemeral slot has been dropped (via ReplicationSlotDropAcquired()),
its slot array entry can be reused immediately by another backend
creating a new slot. As a result, those updates could corrupt
the state of an unrelated replication slot.

Fix by skipping those shared-memory updates for phemeral slots and
performing them only for non-ephemeral slots, whose shared-memory
entries remain valid after release.

Backpatch to all supported versions.

Author: Zhijie Hou <[email-masked]>
Reviewed-by: Masao Fujii <[email-masked]>
Reviewed-by: Srinath Reddy Sadipiralla <[email-masked]>
Reviewed-by: Xuneng Zhou <[email-masked]>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/[email-masked]
Backpatch-through: 14

Branch
------
master

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f2081a7800f1696cb0415bacd655cb41b7b9ca63

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/replication/slot.c | 68 ++++++++++++++++++++++--------------------
1 file changed, 35 insertions(+), 33 deletions(-)