Bug 2395246 (CVE-2023-53149)

Summary: CVE-2023-53149 kernel: ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback
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: medium    
Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-09-15 15:02:53 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback

Ext4 has a filesystem wide lock protecting ext4_writepages() calls to
avoid races with switching of journalled data flag or inode format. This
lock can however cause a deadlock like:

CPU0                            CPU1

ext4_writepages()
  percpu_down_read(sbi->s_writepages_rwsem);
                                ext4_change_inode_journal_flag()
                                  percpu_down_write(sbi->s_writepages_rwsem);
                                    - blocks, all readers block from now on
  ext4_do_writepages()
    ext4_init_io_end()
      kmem_cache_zalloc(io_end_cachep, GFP_KERNEL)
        fs_reclaim frees dentry...
          dentry_unlink_inode()
            iput() - last ref =>
              iput_final() - inode dirty =>
                write_inode_now()...
                  ext4_writepages() tries to acquire sbi->s_writepages_rwsem
                    and blocks forever

Make sure we cannot recurse into filesystem reclaim from writeback code
to avoid the deadlock.