ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback
En bref
Sévérité
Non disponible
EPSS
EPSS 0.12 % · centile 2 (2026-10-27)
État
PUBLISHED
Publiée
Mise à jour
Attribuée par
Linux
Statut NVD
Analyzed
Description
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.
