CVE-2026-98536

CVE-2026-98536 · writeback: report a Tasks-RCU quiescent state per cgwb drain pass

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This page shows selected source facts. See the linked advisories for the complete description and affected versions.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: writeback: report a Tasks-RCU quiescent state per cgwb drain pass cleanup_offline_cgwbs_workfn() drains a dying cgwb by calling cleanup_offline_cgwb() until it returns false, with a cond_resched() between passes. On a CONFIG_PREEMPTION kernel that cond_resched() does nothing: _cond_resched() is a plain "return 0", and under PREEMPT_DYNAMIC the full and lazy modes disable it. Since commit 7dadeaa6e851 ("sched: Further restrict the preemption modes") those are the only two models on the architectures with PREEMPT_LAZY support, arm64 and x86 among them, so the drain loop never reports a Tasks-RCU quiescent state. A worker draining a cgwb with millions of attached inodes runs for minutes. On a 6.18 arm64 host in lazy mode the cgwb worker drained one dying cgroup's writeback domain for over 11 minutes. A BPF program unlink (bpf_trampoline_unlink_prog -> bpf_trampoline_update -> unregister_ftrace_direct -> ftrace_shutdown -> synchronize_rcu_tasks()) waited on that grace period while holding the trampoline mutex, 42 tasks queued behind it in D state, and the hung task detector fired at 614 s and panicked the host. Any BPF or ftrace detach during a long drain inherits the drain's length. Fix this by calling cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() so we do not stall out anybody who calls sycnrhonize_rcu_tasks(). We put this in a do { } while loop because if we have many small cgroups cleanup_offline_cgwb() will return false and we will never call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), creating the same problem.

EPSS 0.2% · Fix available

Published

2026-10-18T15:18:04.013Z

Updated

2026-10-19T09:21:19.730Z

Stack: system

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