In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfs: Fix readahead synchronisation issues by loading all folios upfront There are some synchronisation issues that derive from the app thread adding more folios to t…

Overview

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

netfs: Fix readahead synchronisation issues by loading all folios upfront

There are some synchronisation issues that derive from the app thread adding more folios to the rolling buffer whilst the collector thread is looking at them or trying to clear them, such as determining the setting of front_folio_order when the next folio hasn't been added yet,

The reason for the rolling buffer approach is that loading the buffer upfront and then dropping all the refs just acquired is quite a slow operation, and loading progressively allows some of the cost to be deferred until after at least some of the I/O is started.

Instead, a better way is to load all the folios into the rolling buffer upfront - and then drop the refs later, once the I/O is in progress. (Even better would be for the refs not to be there at all.)

Fix this by changing the rolling buffer loader to load all the folios selected by the VM for readahead upfront into the folio queue. The folio queue is allocated a batch worth at a time as we don't know how many folios are involved (the readahead_control struct, alas, has a page count, not a folio count).

The folio refs acquired from readahead are then dropped in bulk once the first subrequest is dispatched as it's quite a slow operation. The collector waits for NETFS_RREQ_NEED_PUT_RA_REFS to be cleared so that it doesn't unlock folios before the xarray has been scanned for them.

This simplifies the buffer handling later and isn't noticeably slower as the xarray doesn't need to be modified and the folios are all already pre-locked.

Remediation

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