CVEvulnerability
CVE-2023-53149
5.5 MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Status
- Analyzed
- Published
- 2025-09-15
- Last modified
- 2026-06-17
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 5.5 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-667
Description
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.
Affected configurations
• linux linux kernel (>= 4.7 < 6.2.16)
• linux linux kernel (>= 6.3 < 6.3.3)
• linux linux kernel 6.4
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-667 Improper Locking weakness