When LGWR wakes up, it first takes the redo writing latch to update the SGA variable that shows whether it is active. This prevents other Oracle processes from posting LGWR needlessly. LGWR then takes the redo allocation latch to determine how much redo might be available to write (subject to the release of the redo copy latches). If none, it takes the redo writing latch again to record that it is no longer active, before starting another rdbms ipc message wait.
If there is redo to write, LGWR then inspects the latch recovery areas for the redo copy latches (without taking the latches) to determine whether there are any incomplete copies into the log buffer. For incomplete copies above the sync RBA, LGWR just defers the writing of that block and subsequent log buffer blocks. For incomplete copies below the sync RBA, LGWR sleeps on a LGWR wait for redo copy wait event, and is posted when the required copy latches have been released. The time taken by LGWR to take the redo writing and redo allocation latches and to wait for the redo copy latches is accumulated in the redo writer latching time statistic.
(Prior to release 8i, foreground processes held the redo copy latches more briefly because they did not retain them for the application of the change vectors. Therefore, LGWR would instead attempt to assure itself that there were no ongoing copies into the log buffer by taking all the redo copy latches.)
After each redo write has completed, LGWR takes the redo allocation latch again in order to update the SGA variable containing the base disk block for the log buffer. This effectively frees the log buffer blocks that have just been written, so that they may be reused.
