Bug 2337337 (CVE-2024-57839)

Summary: CVE-2024-57839 kernel: Revert "readahead: properly shorten readahead when falling back to do_page_cache_ra()"
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: dfreiber, drow, jburrell, vkumar
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OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-01-13 11:56:18 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

Revert "readahead: properly shorten readahead when falling back to do_page_cache_ra()"

This reverts commit 7c877586da3178974a8a94577b6045a48377ff25.

Anders and Philippe have reported that recent kernels occasionally hang
when used with NFS in readahead code.  The problem has been bisected to
7c877586da3 ("readahead: properly shorten readahead when falling back to
do_page_cache_ra()").  The cause of the problem is that ra->size can be
shrunk by read_pages() call and subsequently we end up calling
do_page_cache_ra() with negative (read huge positive) number of pages. 
Let's revert 7c877586da3 for now until we can find a proper way how the
logic in read_pages() and page_cache_ra_order() can coexist.  This can
lead to reduced readahead throughput due to readahead window confusion but
that's better than outright hangs.

Comment 1 Avinash Hanwate 2025-01-13 13:13:16 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025011101-CVE-2024-57839-daf6@gregkh/T