Bug 2373374 (CVE-2025-38017)
| Summary: | CVE-2025-38017 kernel: Linux kernel: Denial of Service via endless busy loop in eventpoll | ||
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| Product: | [Other] Security Response | Reporter: | OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport> |
| Component: | vulnerability | Assignee: | Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev> |
| Status: | NEW --- | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | unspecified | CC: | dfreiber, drow, jburrell, rhel-process-autobot, vkumar, watson-tool-maintainers |
| Target Milestone: | --- | Keywords: | Security |
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
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| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | --- | |
| Doc Text: |
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's eventpoll subsystem. A local user can exploit this vulnerability by calling `epoll_pwait2` with a short timeout. This can lead to an endless busy loop within the kernel, causing a soft lockup, Read-Copy-Update (RCU) stalls, and deadlocks, ultimately resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) for the system.
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Story Points: | --- |
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| Last Closed: | Type: | --- | |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
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| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
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In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fs/eventpoll: fix endless busy loop after timeout has expired After commit 0a65bc27bd64 ("eventpoll: Set epoll timeout if it's in the future"), the following program would immediately enter a busy loop in the kernel: ``` int main() { int e = epoll_create1(0); struct epoll_event event = {.events = EPOLLIN}; epoll_ctl(e, EPOLL_CTL_ADD, 0, &event); const struct timespec timeout = {.tv_nsec = 1}; epoll_pwait2(e, &event, 1, &timeout, 0); } ``` This happens because the given (non-zero) timeout of 1 nanosecond usually expires before ep_poll() is entered and then ep_schedule_timeout() returns false, but `timed_out` is never set because the code line that sets it is skipped. This quickly turns into a soft lockup, RCU stalls and deadlocks, inflicting severe headaches to the whole system. When the timeout has expired, we don't need to schedule a hrtimer, but we should set the `timed_out` variable. Therefore, I suggest moving the ep_schedule_timeout() check into the `timed_out` expression instead of skipping it. brauner: Note that there was an earlier fix by Joe Damato in response to my bug report in [1].