Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/shrinker: do not hold RCU lock in shrinker_debugfs_count_show()
Reading the debugfs “count” file of a memcg-aware shrinker can sleep inside an RCU read-side critical section:
BUG: sleeping function called from invalid context at kernel/cgroup/rstat.c:421 RCU nest depth: 1, expected: 0 css_rstat_flush mem_cgroup_flush_stats zswap_shrinker_count shrinker_debugfs_count_show
shrinker_debugfs_count_show() invokes the ->count_objects() callback under rcu_read_lock(). The zswap callback flushes memcg stats via css_rstat_flush(), which may sleep, so it must not run under RCU.
The RCU lock is not needed here. mem_cgroup_iter() takes RCU internally and returns a memcg holding a css reference (dropped on the next iteration or by mem_cgroup_iter_break()), so the memcg stays alive without it. The shrinker is kept alive by the open debugfs file: shrinker_free() removes the debugfs entries via debugfs_remove_recursive(), which waits for in-flight readers to drain, before call_rcu(…, shrinker_free_rcu_cb). The sibling “scan” handler already invokes the sleeping ->scan_objects() callback with no RCU section.
Drop the rcu_read_lock()/rcu_read_unlock().
Details
- Affected product:
- Debian 11 ELS
- Affected packages:
- linux @ 5.10.259
Fixes
KernelCare state
Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.
| Operating system | Status | Covered kernels |
|---|---|---|
| Debian 12 | Will Not Fix |
42 kernels
|