Message-ID: <2025102002-CVE-2025-40007-3315@gregkh>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:27:03 +0200
From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
To: linux-cve-announce@...r.kernel.org
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...nel.org>
Subject: CVE-2025-40007: netfs: fix reference leak

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...nel.org>

Description
===========

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

netfs: fix reference leak

Commit 20d72b00ca81 ("netfs: Fix the request's work item to not
require a ref") modified netfs_alloc_request() to initialize the
reference counter to 2 instead of 1.  The rationale was that the
requet's "work" would release the second reference after completion
(via netfs_{read,write}_collection_worker()).  That works most of the
time if all goes well.

However, it leaks this additional reference if the request is released
before the I/O operation has been submitted: the error code path only
decrements the reference counter once and the work item will never be
queued because there will never be a completion.

This has caused outages of our whole server cluster today because
tasks were blocked in netfs_wait_for_outstanding_io(), leading to
deadlocks in Ceph (another bug that I will address soon in another
patch).  This was caused by a netfs_pgpriv2_begin_copy_to_cache() call
which failed in fscache_begin_write_operation().  The leaked
netfs_io_request was never completed, leaving `netfs_inode.io_count`
with a positive value forever.

All of this is super-fragile code.  Finding out which code paths will
lead to an eventual completion and which do not is hard to see:

- Some functions like netfs_create_write_req() allocate a request, but
  will never submit any I/O.

- netfs_unbuffered_read_iter_locked() calls netfs_unbuffered_read()
  and then netfs_put_request(); however, netfs_unbuffered_read() can
  also fail early before submitting the I/O request, therefore another
  netfs_put_request() call must be added there.

A rule of thumb is that functions that return a `netfs_io_request` do
not submit I/O, and all of their callers must be checked.

For my taste, the whole netfs code needs an overhaul to make reference
counting easier to understand and less fragile & obscure.  But to fix
this bug here and now and produce a patch that is adequate for a
stable backport, I tried a minimal approach that quickly frees the
request object upon early failure.

I decided against adding a second netfs_put_request() each time
because that would cause code duplication which obscures the code
further.  Instead, I added the function netfs_put_failed_request()
which frees such a failed request synchronously under the assumption
that the reference count is exactly 2 (as initially set by
netfs_alloc_request() and never touched), verified by a
WARN_ON_ONCE().  It then deinitializes the request object (without
going through the "cleanup_work" indirection) and frees the allocation
(with RCU protection to protect against concurrent access by
netfs_requests_seq_start()).

All code paths that fail early have been changed to call
netfs_put_failed_request() instead of netfs_put_request().
Additionally, I have added a netfs_put_request() call to
netfs_unbuffered_read() as explained above because the
netfs_put_failed_request() approach does not work there.

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2025-40007 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Issue introduced in 6.16 with commit 20d72b00ca814d748f5663484e5c53bb2bf37a3a and fixed in 6.16.10 with commit 8df142e93098b4531fadb5dfcf93087649f570b3
	Issue introduced in 6.16 with commit 20d72b00ca814d748f5663484e5c53bb2bf37a3a and fixed in 6.17 with commit 4d428dca252c858bfac691c31fa95d26cd008706
	Issue introduced in 6.15.3 with commit 1a8360c2eed3b292ed654c2ac61b09de4a80e298

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2025-40007
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	fs/netfs/buffered_read.c
	fs/netfs/direct_read.c
	fs/netfs/direct_write.c
	fs/netfs/internal.h
	fs/netfs/objects.c
	fs/netfs/read_pgpriv2.c
	fs/netfs/read_single.c
	fs/netfs/write_issue.c


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8df142e93098b4531fadb5dfcf93087649f570b3
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4d428dca252c858bfac691c31fa95d26cd008706

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