published September 12, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
NFS: fix delegation_hash_table leak when nfs4_server_common_setup() fails
nfs4_server_common_setup() allocates server->delegation_hash_table
first, but server->destroy - the only path that frees the table via
nfs4_destroy_server() - is not assigned until the very end of the
function. If any intermediate step fails (the is_ds_only_client()
check, nfs4_init_session(), nfs4_get_rootfh(), or nfs_probe_server()),
the function returns with server->destroy still NULL, so the caller's
nfs_free_server() skips the destroy callback and the hash table is
leaked (4 KiB per attempt with the default delegation watermark).
This is trivially reachable from userspace: every failed NFSv4 mount
leaks one allocation. A client that persistently retries a mount that
cannot succeed leaks kernel memory without bound. Observed in
production where a Longhorn backup poller retried mount.nfs4 against
an NFSv3-only server roughly 10 times per second, leaking ~3.4 GiB of
unreclaimable slab (kmalloc-rnd-13-4k) per day; the node accumulated
12 GiB of leaked slab before the source was identified via the
kmem:kmalloc tracepoint (call_site=nfs4_delegation_hash_alloc).
Reproducer:
# server exports NFSv3 only (or export path absent for v4)
while :; do mount -t nfs4 <server>:/missing /mnt; done
# watch SUnreclaim in /proc/meminfo grow 4 KiB per iteration
Free the table on the error paths between the allocation and the
assignment of server->destroy.