published October 18, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
writeback: report a Tasks-RCU quiescent state per cgwb drain pass
cleanup_offline_cgwbs_workfn() drains a dying cgwb by calling
cleanup_offline_cgwb() until it returns false, with a cond_resched()
between passes. On a CONFIG_PREEMPTION kernel that cond_resched() does
nothing: _cond_resched() is a plain "return 0", and under PREEMPT_DYNAMIC
the full and lazy modes disable it. Since commit 7dadeaa6e851 ("sched:
Further restrict the preemption modes") those are the only two models on
the architectures with PREEMPT_LAZY support, arm64 and x86 among them, so
the drain loop never reports a Tasks-RCU quiescent state.
A worker draining a cgwb with millions of attached inodes runs for
minutes. On a 6.18 arm64 host in lazy mode the cgwb worker drained one
dying cgroup's writeback domain for over 11 minutes. A BPF program unlink
(bpf_trampoline_unlink_prog -> bpf_trampoline_update ->
unregister_ftrace_direct -> ftrace_shutdown -> synchronize_rcu_tasks())
waited on that grace period while holding the trampoline mutex, 42 tasks
queued behind it in D state, and the hung task detector fired at 614 s and
panicked the host. Any BPF or ftrace detach during a long drain inherits
the drain's length.
Fix this by calling cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() so we do not stall out
anybody who calls sycnrhonize_rcu_tasks(). We put this in a do { } while
loop because if we have many small cgroups cleanup_offline_cgwb() will
return false and we will never call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), creating
the same problem.