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kv/storage: introduce local timestamps for MVCC versions in MVCCValue
Fixes #36431. Fixes #49360. Replaces #72121. Replaces #77342. This commit fixes the potential for a stale read as detailed in #36431 using the "remember when intents were written" approach described in #36431 (comment) and later expanded on in #72121 (comment). This bug requires a combination of skewed clocks, multi-key transactions split across ranges whose leaseholders are stored on different nodes, a transaction read refresh, and the use of observed timestamps to avoid an uncertainty restart. With the combination of these four factors, it was possible to construct an ordering of events that violated real-time ordering and allowed a transaction to observe a stale read. Upon the discovery of the bug, we [introduced](cockroachdb/jepsen#19) the `multi-register` test to the Jepsen test suite, and have since observed the test fail when combined with the `strobe-skews` nemesis due to this bug in #49360 (and a few issues linked to that one). This commit stabilizes that test. \### Explanation The combination of all of the factors listed above can lead to the stale read because it breaks one of the invariants that the observed timestamp infrastructure[^1] relied upon for correctness. Specifically, observed timestamps relied on the guarantee that a leaseholder's clock must always be equal to or greater than the version timestamp of all writes that it has served. However, this guarantee did not always hold. It does hold for non-transactional writes. It also holds for transactions that perform all of their intent writes at the same timestamp and then commit at this timestamp. However, it does not hold for transactions which move their commit timestamp forward over their lifetime before committing, writing intents at different timestamps along the way and "pulling them up" to the commit timestamp after committing. In violating the invariant, this third case reveals an ambiguity in what it means for a leaseholder to "serve a write at a timestamp". The meaning of this phrase is straightforward for non-transactional writes. However, for an intent write whose original timestamp is provisional and whose eventual commit timestamp is stored indirectly in its transaction record at its time of commit, the meaning is less clear. This reconciliation to move the intent write's timestamp up to its transaction's commit timestamp is asynchronous from the transaction commit (and after it has been externally acknowledged). So even if a leaseholder has only served writes with provisional timestamps up to timestamp 100 (placing a lower bound on its clock of 100), it can be in possession of intents that, when resolved, will carry a timestamp of 200. To uphold the real-time ordering property, this value must be observed by any transaction that begins after the value's transaction committed and was acknowledged. So for observed timestamps to be correct as currently written, we would need a guarantee that this value's leaseholder would never return an observed timestamp < 200 at any point after the transaction commits. But with the transaction commit possibly occurring on another node and with communication to resolve the intent occurring asynchronously, this seems like an impossible guarantee to make. This would appear to undermine observed timestamps to the point where they cannot be used. However, we can claw back correctness without sacrificing performance by recognizing that only a small fraction[^2] of transactions commit at a different timestamps than the one they used while writing intents. We can also recognize that if we were to compare observed timestamps against the timestamp that a committed value was originally written (its provisional value if it was once an intent) instead of the timestamp that it had been moved to on commit, then the invariant would hold. This commit exploits this second observation by adding a second timestamp to each MVCC key-value version called the "local timestamp". The existing version timestamp dictates the key-value's visibility to readers and is tied to the writer's commit timestamp. The local clock timestamp records the value of the local HLC clock on the leaseholder when the key was originally written. It is used to make claims about the relative real time ordering of the key's writer and readers when comparing a reader's uncertainty interval (and observed timestamps) to the key. Ignoring edge cases, readers with an observed timestamp from the key's leaseholder that is greater than the local clock timestamp stored in the key cannot make claims about real time ordering and must consider it possible that the key's write occurred before the read began. However, readers with an observed timestamp from the key's leaseholder that is less than the clock timestamp can claim that the reader captured that observed timestamp before the key was written and therefore can consider the key's write to have been concurrent with the read. In doing so, the reader can avoid an uncertainty restart. For more, see the updates made in this commit to pkg/kv/kvserver/observedts/doc.go. To avoid the bulk of the performance hit from adding this new timestamp to each key-value pair, the commit optimizes the clock timestamp away in the common case where it leads the version timestamp. Only in the rare cases where the local timestamp trails the version timestamp (e.g. future-time writes, async intent resolution with a new commit timestamp) does the local timestamp need to be explicitly represented in the key encoding. This is possible because it is safe for the local clock timestamp to be rounded down, as this will simply lead to additional uncertainty restarts. However, it is not safe for the local clock timestamp to be rounded up, as this could lead to stale reads. \### MVCCValue To store the local timestamp, the commit introduces a new MVCCValue type to parallel the MVCCKey type. MVCCValue wraps a roachpb.Value and extends it with MVCC-level metadata which is stored in an enginepb.MVCCValueHeader struct. To this point, the MVCC layer has treated versioned values as opaque blobs of bytes and has not enforced any structure on them. Now that MVCC will use the value to store metadata, it needs to enforce more structure on the values provided to it. This is the cause of some testing churn, but is otherwise not a problem, as all production code paths were already passing values in the roachpb.Value encoding. To further avoid any performance hit, MVCCValue has a "simple" and an "extended" encoding scheme, depending on whether the value's header is empty or not. If the value's header is empty, it is omitted in the encoding and the mvcc value's encoding is identical to that of roachpb.Value. This provided backwards compatibility and ensures that the MVCCValue optimizes away in the common case. If the value's header is not empty, it is prepended to the roachpb.Value encoding. The encoding scheme's variants are: ``` Simple (identical to the roachpb.Value encoding): <4-byte-checksum><1-byte-tag><encoded-data> Extended (header prepended to roachpb.Value encoding): <4-byte-header-len><1-byte-sentinel><mvcc-header><4-byte-checksum><1-byte-tag><encoded-data> ``` The two encoding scheme variants are distinguished using the 5th byte, which is either the roachpb.Value tag (which has many possible values) or a sentinel tag not used by the roachpb.Value encoding which indicates the extended encoding scheme. Care was taken to ensure that encoding and decoding routines for the "simple" encoding are fast by avoiding heap allocations, memory copies, or function calls by exploiting mid-stack inlining. \### Future improvements As noted in #72121 (comment), this commit paves a path towards the complete removal of synthetic timestamps, which were originally introduced in support of non-blocking transactions and GLOBAL tables. The synthetic bit's first role of providing dynamic typing for `ClockTimestamps` is no longer necessary now that we never need to "push" transaction-domain timestamps into HLC clocks. Instead, the invariant that underpins observed timestamps is enforced by "pulling" local timestamps from the leaseholder's HLC clock. The synthetic bit's second role of disabling observed timestamps is replaced by the generalization provided by "local timestamps". Local timestamps precisely track when an MVCC version was written in the leaseholder's clock timestamp domain. This establishes a total ordering across clock observations (local timestamp assignment for writers and observed timestamps for readers) and establish a partial ordering between writer and reader transactions. As a result, the use of observed timestamps during uncertainty checking becomes a comparison between two `ClockTimestamps`, the version's local timestamp and the reader's observed timestamp. \### Correctness testing I was not able to stress `jepsen/multi-register/strobe-skews` hard enough to cause it to fail, even on master. We've only seen the test fail a handful of times over the past few years, so this isn't much of a surprise. Still, this prevents us from saying anything concrete about an reduced failure rate. However, the commit does add a new test called `TestTxnReadWithinUncertaintyIntervalAfterIntentResolution` which controls manual clocks directly and was able to deterministically reproduce the stale read before this fix in a few different ways. After this fix, the test passes. \### Performance analysis This correctness fix will lead to an increased rate of transaction retries under some workloads. TODO(nvanbenschoten): - microbenchmarks - single-process benchmarks - compare YCSB performance ---- Release note (bug fix): fixed a rare race condition that could allow for a transaction to serve a stale read and violate real-time ordering under moderate clock skew. [^1]: see [pkg/kv/kvserver/observedts/doc.go](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/pkg/kv/kvserver/observedts/doc.go) for an explanation of the role of observed timestamps in the transaction model. This commit updates that documentation to include this fix. [^2]: see analysis in #36431 (comment).
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