CVE Catalog

CVE-2023-53149

MediumCVSS 5.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.12%

2th percentile - higher than 2% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel ext4 filesystem, a deadlock can occur during fs reclaim with page writeback. The filesystem-wide lock protecting ext4_writepages() can cause a thread to block forever when it tries to reacquire the lock during memory reclaim.

Risk Assessment

This can hang processes and the entire ext4 filesystem, causing service unavailability and requiring a restart.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix that prevents recursion into filesystem reclaim from writeback code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback Ext4 has a filesystem wide lock protecting ext4_writepages() calls to avoid races with switching of journalled data flag or inode format. This lock can however cause a deadlock like: CPU0 CPU1 ext4_writepages() percpu_down_read(sbi->s_writepages_rwsem); ext4_change_inode_journal_flag() percpu_down_write(sbi->s_writepages_rwsem); - blocks, all readers block from now on ext4_do_writepages() ext4_init_io_end() kmem_cache_zalloc(io_end_cachep, GFP_KERNEL) fs_reclaim frees dentry... dentry_unlink_inode() iput() - last ref => iput_final() - inode dirty => write_inode_now()... ext4_writepages() tries to acquire sbi->s_writepages_rwsem and blocks forever Make sure we cannot recurse into filesystem reclaim from writeback code to avoid the deadlock.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS