Skip to main content
← All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-64525

xfrm: move policy_bydst RCU sync from per-netns .exit to .pre_exit

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 6.12.93, 6.18.35, 6.2, 6.7, 6.20, and 1 more
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xfrm: move policy_bydst RCU sync from per-netns .exit to .pre_exit The struct pernet_operations docstring in include/net/net_namespace.h explicitly warns against blocking RCU primitives in .exit handlers: Exit methods using blocking RCU primitives, such as synchronize_rcu(), should be implemented via exit_batch. [...] Please, avoid synchronize_rcu() at all, where it's possible. Note that a combination of pre_exit() and exit() can be used, since a synchronize_rcu() is guaranteed between the calls. xfrm_policy_fini() violates this: it calls synchronize_rcu() before freeing the policy_bydst hash tables (so no RCU reader is mid- traversal at free time), but runs from xfrm_net_ops.exit -- once per namespace -- so a cleanup_net() of N namespaces pays N full RCU grace periods serially. Use the documented pre_exit/exit split. Move the policy flush (and the workqueue drains it depends on) into a new .pre_exit handler; xfrm_policy_fini() then runs in .exit and frees the hash tables after the synchronize_rcu_expedited() that cleanup_net() guarantees between the two phases. Providing O(1) RCU grace periods per batch instead of O(N). Observed on Linux 6.18 with a workload doing unshare(CLONE_NEWNET) at ~13/sec sustained: cleanup_net() and the netns_wq rescuer kthread both stuck in xfrm_policy_fini()'s synchronize_rcu(), >300k struct net accumulated in the cleanup queue, Percpu in /proc/meminfo climbed to 130+ GB on 256-CPU hosts, and memcg OOMs followed. setup_net and __put_net counts were balanced, ruling out a refcount leak.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • Linux Linux

    From 6.12.83 · fixed in 6.12.93; From 6.18.24 · fixed in 6.18.35; From 6.1.191 · fixed in 6.2; From 6.6.136 · fixed in 6.7; From 6.19.14 · fixed in 6.20

  • Linux Linux

    7.0

  • KernelLinux

    fixed in 6.12.93; From 6.13.0 · fixed in 6.18.35; From 6.19.0 · fixed in 7.0.12

References 4

git.kernel.org