CVE-2023-53149

MEDIUM

Linux Kernel - Denial of Service via Deadlock in ext4_writepages

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

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.

Scores

CVSS v3 5.5
EPSS 0.0011
EPSS Percentile 1.5%
Attack Vector LOCAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-667
Status published
Products (10)
Linux/Linux < 4.7
Linux/Linux 4.7
Linux/Linux 6.2.16 - 6.2.*
Linux/Linux 6.3.3 - 6.3.*
Linux/Linux 6.4
Linux/Linux c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f - 00d873c17e29cc32d90ca852b82685f1673acaa5
Linux/Linux c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f - 2ec97dc90df40c50e509809dc9a198638a7e18b6
Linux/Linux c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f - 4b4340bf04ce9a52061f15000ecedd126abc093c
linux/linux_kernel 6.4 rc1
linux/linux_kernel 4.7 - 6.2.16
Published Sep 15, 2025
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026