Bug 2555042 (CVE-2026-98644)

Summary: CVE-2026-98644 kernel: bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) subsystem. A local user could cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by executing batch lookup or deletion operations on large hash maps. Due to a missing rescheduling check when traversing consecutive empty hash table entries, the kernel can monopolize the processor for prolonged periods without yielding. This issue triggers a soft lockup condition, resulting in system unresponsiveness.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-18 15:41:13 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch()

__htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() has no rescheduling point. The
batch count bounds how many entries are copied out, not how many
buckets are visited, so one BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH call can walk the
map end to end. The empty-bucket fast path is worse: it stays inside
a single rcu_read_lock() / bpf_disable_instrumentation() section for
any run of consecutive empty buckets.

That holds up on small maps, but it falls apart at scale. On a
144-CPU arm64 host running a CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE kernel, periodic
BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH calls against an LRU hash map with 16,777,216
buckets held a CPU inside the batch op for 77+ seconds and triggered
the soft lockup watchdog.

Commit 75134f16e7dd ("bpf: Add schedule points in batch ops") fixed this
same problem in the generic batch ops, but not in this htab-native path,
which every htab-based hash map variant uses for its lookup[_and_delete]
batch ops.

Complete that fix here. Leave the critical section after 64 consecutive
empty buckets, call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), and resume at the saved
bucket cursor. No locks are held at that point, and resuming from the
cursor is already the function's behavior for non-empty buckets. Add the
same call to the per-bucket loop after copy_to_user(), where every lock
has been dropped. cond_resched_rcu() is not enough here: sleeping with
bpf_prog_active elevated makes tracing programs on that CPU silently
skip their invocations.

Plain cond_resched() is not enough either. It is a no-op under PREEMPT
and PREEMPT_LAZY, the only models arm64 and x86 have offered since
commit 7dadeaa6e851 ("sched: Further restrict the preemption modes").
It is also never a Tasks RCU quiescent state, in any model: the
reschedule counts as a preemption. The walking task stays a holdout and
stalls every synchronize_rcu_tasks() caller, ftrace and BPF trampoline
teardown included, until the syscall returns [1].
cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() is the usual tool for that [2]. It reports
the quiescent state at each yield and still reschedules as
cond_resched() does on PREEMPT_NONE and PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY kernels.