Bug 2356614 (CVE-2025-21895)

Summary: CVE-2025-21895 kernel: perf/core: Order the PMU list to fix warning about unordered pmu_ctx_list
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
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Priority: low    
Version: unspecifiedCC: dfreiber, drow, jburrell, vkumar
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-04-01 16:02:35 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

perf/core: Order the PMU list to fix warning about unordered pmu_ctx_list

Syskaller triggers a warning due to prev_epc->pmu != next_epc->pmu in
perf_event_swap_task_ctx_data(). vmcore shows that two lists have the same
perf_event_pmu_context, but not in the same order.

The problem is that the order of pmu_ctx_list for the parent is impacted by
the time when an event/PMU is added. While the order for a child is
impacted by the event order in the pinned_groups and flexible_groups. So
the order of pmu_ctx_list in the parent and child may be different.

To fix this problem, insert the perf_event_pmu_context to its proper place
after iteration of the pmu_ctx_list.

The follow testcase can trigger above warning:

 # perf record -e cycles --call-graph lbr -- taskset -c 3 ./a.out &
 # perf stat -e cpu-clock,cs -p xxx // xxx is the pid of a.out

 test.c

 void main() {
        int count = 0;
        pid_t pid;

        printf("%d running\n", getpid());
        sleep(30);
        printf("running\n");

        pid = fork();
        if (pid == -1) {
                printf("fork error\n");
                return;
        }
        if (pid == 0) {
                while (1) {
                        count++;
                }
        } else {
                while (1) {
                        count++;
                }
        }
 }

The testcase first opens an LBR event, so it will allocate task_ctx_data,
and then open tracepoint and software events, so the parent context will
have 3 different perf_event_pmu_contexts. On inheritance, child ctx will
insert the perf_event_pmu_context in another order and the warning will
trigger.

[ mingo: Tidied up the changelog. ]