CVE-2023-53149

ext4: avoid deadlock in fs reclaim with page writeback

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
Sep 15, 2025
Updated
Oct 30, 2026
Reserved
May 2, 2025

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Description

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.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f to before 385b49a1f34b26f62e3834c773560b120825b6f8Affected
  • c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f to before 2ec97dc90df40c50e509809dc9a198638a7e18b6Affected
  • c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f to before 4b4340bf04ce9a52061f15000ecedd126abc093cAffected
  • c8585c6fcaf2011de54c3592e80a634a2b9e1a7f to before 00d873c17e29cc32d90ca852b82685f1673acaa5Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 4.7Affected
  • before 4.7Not affected
  • 6.1.191 through 6.1.*Not affected
  • 6.2.16 through 6.2.*Not affected
  • 6.3.3 through 6.3.*Not affected
  • 6.4 and laterNot affected

References

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