CVE-2022-48800

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm: vmscan: remove deadlock due to throttling failing to make progress

A soft lockup bug in kcompactd was reported in a private bugzilla with the following visible in dmesg;

watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 26s! [kcompactd0:479] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 52s! [kcompactd0:479] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 78s! [kcompactd0:479] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 104s! [kcompactd0:479]

The machine had 256G of RAM with no swap and an earlier failed allocation indicated that node 0 where kcompactd was run was potentially unreclaimable;

Node 0 active_anon:29355112kB inactive_anon:2913528kB active_file:0kB inactive_file:0kB unevictable:64kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB mapped:8kB dirty:0kB writeback:0kB shmem:26780kB shmem_thp: 0kB shmem_pmdmapped: 0kB anon_thp: 23480320kB writeback_tmp:0kB kernel_stack:2272kB pagetables:24500kB all_unreclaimable? yes

Vlastimil Babka investigated a crash dump and found that a task migrating pages was trying to drain PCP lists;

PID: 52922 TASK: ffff969f820e5000 CPU: 19 COMMAND: kworker/u128:3 Call Trace: __schedule schedule schedule_timeout wait_for_completion __flush_work __drain_all_pages __alloc_pages_slowpath.constprop.114 __alloc_pages alloc_migration_target migrate_pages migrate_to_node do_migrate_pages cpuset_migrate_mm_workfn process_one_work worker_thread kthread ret_from_fork

This failure is specific to CONFIG_PREEMPT=n builds. The root of the problem is that kcompact0 is not rescheduling on a CPU while a task that has isolated a large number of the pages from the LRU is waiting on kcompact0 to reschedule so the pages can be released. While shrink_inactive_list() only loops once around too_many_isolated, reclaim can continue without rescheduling if sc->skipped_deactivate == 1 which could happen if there was no file LRU and the inactive anon list was not low.

Weakness

The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.

Affected Software

Extended Description

Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.

Potential Mitigations

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/25.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/27.html

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3980cff6349687f73d5109f156f23cb261c24164
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b485c6f1f9f54b81443efda5f3d8a5036ba2cd91