Overview

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ublk: avoid teardown retry loop on xarray allocation failure

__ublk_shmem_remove_ranges() removes matching maple tree ranges in batches, but first stores each range into a temporary xarray so that the pages can be unpinned after dropping the maple tree lock.

That temporary xarray is filled under the maple tree lock with xa_store(..., GFP_ATOMIC). If the store fails before mas_erase(), the current range is left in the tree and the helper returns false. The outer ublk_shmem_remove_ranges() loop then immediately retries the same range. While the atomic allocation keeps failing, the teardown path has no forward progress.

The issue can be reproduced with radix_tree_node failslab injection after a SHMEM_ZC buffer has already been registered:

Kernel config:

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_UBLK=y

CONFIG_DEBUG_FS=y

CONFIG_FAULT_INJECTION=y

CONFIG_FAULT_INJECTION_DEBUG_FS=y

CONFIG_FAILSLAB=y

echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages mkdir -p /tmp/htlb mount -t hugetlbfs none /tmp/htlb fallocate -l 4M /tmp/htlb/ublk_buf

dev_id=$(kublk add -t null --shmem_zc
--htlb /tmp/htlb/ublk_buf | awk -F '[ :]' '/dev id/ {print $3}')

echo 1 > /sys/kernel/slab/radix_tree_node/failslab echo Y > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/cache-filter echo Y > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/ignore-gfp-wait echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/interval echo -1 > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/times echo 100 > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/probability

kublk del -n "$dev_id"

On the unfixed kernel the delete command was still running after 3 seconds. Disabling failslab made it return. The fault-injection stack showed:

should_failslab kmem_cache_alloc_lru_noprof __xas_nomem __xa_store xa_store __ublk_shmem_remove_ranges ublk_cdev_rel ublk_ctrl_del_dev

Remove the allocation from the teardown loop. Keep the existing batch limit, but collect {base_pfn, nr_pages} pairs in a fixed-size stack array. Once a matching range is found, the range is erased from the maple tree before dropping the lock, so each successful scan makes progress without depending on any GFP_ATOMIC allocation.

With the same failslab settings, the fixed kernel completed "kublk del -n $dev_id" successfully in about 45 ms.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.