published September 12, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/migrate: report RCU-tasks quiescent states in migrate_pages_batch()
migrate_pages_batch() unmaps each folio before moving it, and every
unmap runs the mmu_notifier invalidate callbacks. On KVM hosts
try_to_migrate() ends up in kvm_mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start() ->
tdp_mmu_zap_leafs(), which is expensive, so unmapping a large batch keeps
the CPU busy for a long time.
The loop already calls cond_resched(), but on PREEMPTION kernels that is
a no-op, and involuntary preemption is not a Tasks-RCU quiescent state.
A long batch therefore never reports a quiescent state, and the
migrating task (e.g. kcompactd) becomes a Tasks-RCU holdout, stalling the
Tasks-RCU grace period for minutes, which is common at Meta fleet:
INFO: rcu_tasks detected stalls on tasks:
0000000055349ecc: .. nvcsw: 1157401/1157401 holdout: 1 idle_cpu: -1/56 task:kcompactd0 state:R running task
Call Trace:
tdp_mmu_zap_leafs
tdp_mmu_next_root
gfn_to_pfn_cache_invalidate_start
kvm_mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start
__mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start
try_to_migrate_one
try_to_migrate
migrate_pages_batch
migrate_pages
compact_zone
compact_node
kcompactd
kthread
Use cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() so a quiescent state is reported even
when cond_resched() does nothing.
This has also been discussed at [1]