bpf: support deferring bpf_link dealloc to after RCU grace period

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: support deferring bpf_link dealloc to after RCU grace period BPF link for some program types is passed as a "context" which can be used by those BPF programs to look up additional information. E.g., for multi-kprobes and multi-uprobes, link is used to fetch BPF cookie values. Because of this runtime dependency, when bpf_link refcnt drops to zero there could still be active BPF programs running accessing link data. This patch adds generic support to defer bpf_link dealloc callback to after RCU GP, if requested. This is done by exposing two different deallocation callbacks, one synchronous and one deferred. If deferred one is provided, bpf_link_free() will schedule dealloc_deferred() callback to happen after RCU GP. BPF is using two flavors of RCU: "classic" non-sleepable one and RCU tasks trace one. The latter is used when sleepable BPF programs are used. bpf_link_free() accommodates that by checking underlying BPF program's sleepable flag, and goes either through normal RCU GP only for non-sleepable, or through RCU tasks trace GP and then normal RCU GP (taking into account rcu_trace_implies_rcu_gp() optimization), if BPF program is sleepable. We use this for multi-kprobe and multi-uprobe links, which dereference link during program run. We also preventively switch raw_tp link to use deferred dealloc callback, as upcoming changes in bpf-next tree expose raw_tp link data (specifically, cookie value) to BPF program at runtime as well.

Timeline

1. May 19, 2024, 8:34 AM UTCCVE published
2. Sep 10, 2024, 3:41 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Aug 5, 2026, 11:30 AM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• Linux Linux

  Version range not reported

• Linux Linux

  5.18

References 3