CVE-2023-53149

ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback

published September 15, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
1.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00119 · 1.7th percentile
Published
2025-09-15T14:03Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 15 SEP 14:03Z
    ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback
    cvelistv5