Bug 2339132 (CVE-2025-21664) - CVE-2025-21664 kernel: dm thin: make get_first_thin use rcu-safe list first function
Summary: CVE-2025-21664 kernel: dm thin: make get_first_thin use rcu-safe list first f...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2025-21664
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2025-01-21 13:02 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2025-01-27 07:03 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-01-21 13:02:23 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

dm thin: make get_first_thin use rcu-safe list first function

The documentation in rculist.h explains the absence of list_empty_rcu()
and cautions programmers against relying on a list_empty() ->
list_first() sequence in RCU safe code.  This is because each of these
functions performs its own READ_ONCE() of the list head.  This can lead
to a situation where the list_empty() sees a valid list entry, but the
subsequent list_first() sees a different view of list head state after a
modification.

In the case of dm-thin, this author had a production box crash from a GP
fault in the process_deferred_bios path.  This function saw a valid list
head in get_first_thin() but when it subsequently dereferenced that and
turned it into a thin_c, it got the inside of the struct pool, since the
list was now empty and referring to itself.  The kernel on which this
occurred printed both a warning about a refcount_t being saturated, and
a UBSAN error for an out-of-bounds cpuid access in the queued spinlock,
prior to the fault itself.  When the resulting kdump was examined, it
was possible to see another thread patiently waiting in thin_dtr's
synchronize_rcu.

The thin_dtr call managed to pull the thin_c out of the active thins
list (and have it be the last entry in the active_thins list) at just
the wrong moment which lead to this crash.

Fortunately, the fix here is straight forward.  Switch get_first_thin()
function to use list_first_or_null_rcu() which performs just a single
READ_ONCE() and returns NULL if the list is already empty.

This was run against the devicemapper test suite's thin-provisioning
suites for delete and suspend and no regressions were observed.


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