CVE-2025-40007

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

netfs: fix reference leak

Commit 20d72b00ca81 (netfs: Fix the requests work item to not require a ref) modified netfs_alloc_request() to initialize the reference counter to 2 instead of 1. The rationale was that the requets work would release the second reference after completion (via netfs_{read,write}_collection_worker()). That works most of the time if all goes well.

However, it leaks this additional reference if the request is released before the I/O operation has been submitted: the error code path only decrements the reference counter once and the work item will never be queued because there will never be a completion.

This has caused outages of our whole server cluster today because tasks were blocked in netfs_wait_for_outstanding_io(), leading to deadlocks in Ceph (another bug that I will address soon in another patch). This was caused by a netfs_pgpriv2_begin_copy_to_cache() call which failed in fscache_begin_write_operation(). The leaked netfs_io_request was never completed, leaving netfs_inode.io_count with a positive value forever.

All of this is super-fragile code. Finding out which code paths will lead to an eventual completion and which do not is hard to see:

• Some functions like netfs_create_write_req() allocate a request, but will never submit any I/O.

• netfs_unbuffered_read_iter_locked() calls netfs_unbuffered_read() and then netfs_put_request(); however, netfs_unbuffered_read() can also fail early before submitting the I/O request, therefore another netfs_put_request() call must be added there.

A rule of thumb is that functions that return a netfs_io_request do not submit I/O, and all of their callers must be checked.

For my taste, the whole netfs code needs an overhaul to make reference counting easier to understand and less fragile & obscure. But to fix this bug here and now and produce a patch that is adequate for a stable backport, I tried a minimal approach that quickly frees the request object upon early failure.

I decided against adding a second netfs_put_request() each time because that would cause code duplication which obscures the code further. Instead, I added the function netfs_put_failed_request() which frees such a failed request synchronously under the assumption that the reference count is exactly 2 (as initially set by netfs_alloc_request() and never touched), verified by a WARN_ON_ONCE(). It then deinitializes the request object (without going through the cleanup_work indirection) and frees the allocation (with RCU protection to protect against concurrent access by netfs_requests_seq_start()).

All code paths that fail early have been changed to call netfs_put_failed_request() instead of netfs_put_request(). Additionally, I have added a netfs_put_request() call to netfs_unbuffered_read() as explained above because the netfs_put_failed_request() approach does not work there.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4d428dca252c858bfac691c31fa95d26cd008706
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8df142e93098b4531fadb5dfcf93087649f570b3