CVE-2026-90181 PUBLISHED

ublk: avoid teardown retry loop on xarray allocation failure

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 11.09.2026 Published: 17.09.2026 Updated: 17.09.2026

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.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 309e02dccf64e1b7bd2067abedc270e33b0aadf3 to b9cc6cc74daf6fef533dbe65d8cee779fea69600 (excl.)
  • affected from 309e02dccf64e1b7bd2067abedc270e33b0aadf3 to 4fd66a7f829f3f38f92a79081f0f2688aed644f0 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 7.1 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 7.1 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.6 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc1 to * (incl.)

References