CVE-2026-89647

ceph: do not repeat ceph_trim_dentries() if no progress possible

State
Published
Severity
7.5 High
Published
Sep 11, 2026
Updated
Oct 30, 2026
Reserved
Sep 11, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ceph: do not repeat ceph_trim_dentries() if no progress possible

ceph_cap_reclaim_work() re-queues itself for as long as ceph_trim_dentries() returns -EAGAIN, which happens whenever a lease walk exhausts its `nr_to_scan` budget. This creates a busy loop that consumes CPU without making any progress when there is nothing to reclaim: with no cap pressure (`count==0`) and every scanned lease still valid, each pass runs the full scan budget down to zero and returns `-EAGAIN`, only to be queued again immediately.

The dir-lease walk made this worse. When `expire_dir_lease` is `false` (i.e. we have no intention of reclaiming dir leases), __dir_lease_check() returned `TOUCH` for every valid lease. `TOUCH` moves the dentry to the tail of the list and resets `di->time` via __dentry_dir_lease_touch(), so a walk over N valid leases pointlessly rewrote the list, refreshed the timestamps (preventing them from ever aging out) and always drained `nr_to_scan`, guaranteeing the `-EAGAIN` requeue.

Fix this in three steps:

- Return `KEEP` instead of `TOUCH` when `expire_dir_lease` is `false`. If we are not going to reclaim the lease, leave it in place instead of churning the list and resetting its timestamp; the walk then terminates naturally (or via `STOP` at the first fresh lease).

- Only return `-EAGAIN` from the first (dentry-lease) walk when something was actually freed. A full batch that frees nothing means retrying the same list immediately is futile; fall through to the dir-lease walk instead.

- After both walks, bail out with success (0) when nothing was freed and there is no cap pressure (`count==0`). There is no reason to keep retrying when we are not over the cap limit and made no progress.

Under real cap pressure (`count>0`) the reclaim path is unchanged and still retries via `-EAGAIN`.

Without this patch, I saw 500 ceph_trim_dentries() calls per second on our web servers. This is very visible in `/proc/lock_stat` (5 minute capture):

class name con-bounces contentions waittime-min waittime-max waittime-total waittime-avg acq-bounces acquisitions holdtime-min holdtime-max holdtime-total holdtime-avg

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock: 126180 128218 0.04 8063.44 15986965.20 124.69 1573354 5296812 0.04 8291.28 74164526.48 14.00 ----------------------- &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 111736 [<000000007b11e319>] __ceph_dentry_dir_lease_touch+0x7c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 2631 [<0000000050597999>] __dentry_leases_walk+0x64/0x2c8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 3878 [<00000000c0022f62>] __ceph_dentry_lease_touch+0x5c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 9973 [<000000002f27cb6f>] __dentry_lease_unlist+0x50/0xa0 ----------------------- &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 123621 [<0000000050597999>] __dentry_leases_walk+0x64/0x2c8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 1822 [<000000007b11e319>] __ceph_dentry_dir_lease_touch+0x7c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 2720 [<000000002f27cb6f>] __dentry_lease_unlist+0x50/0xa0 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 55 [<00000000c0022f62>] __ceph_dentry_lease_touch+0x5c/0xa8

With this patch:

class name con-bounces contentions waittime-min waittime-max waittime-total waittime-avg acq-bounces acquisitions holdtime-min holdtime-max holdtime-total holdtime-avg

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock: 1203 1215 0.16 408.88 33082.88 27.23 4320501 7357389 0.04 500.64 1961578.00 0.27 ----------------------- &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 1029 [<000000003c9aea8a>] __ceph_dentry_dir_lease_touch+0x7c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 1 ---truncated---

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.5 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HLinux

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e to before f2f6daf8e99e15d636b1706bb4efd9a856195324Affected
  • 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e to before dd2e9824e5e7dba406005ff779a107f773175a76Affected
  • 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e to before 5a541eb401acb89d791da41189d7a79220164b93Affected
  • 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e to before 37d6edb2f03b29399a3a337fae78674de51e1695Affected
  • 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e to before 3d122b2feb1dd76bb5041bdea5e1e1b007d8d415Affected
  • 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e to before e7d7aa7b730178278109c41fa1b17b06873065d5Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 5.1Affected
  • before 5.1Not affected
  • 6.1.191 through 6.1.*Not affected
  • 6.6.160 through 6.6.*Not affected
  • 6.12.109 through 6.12.*Not affected
  • 6.18.50 through 6.18.*Not affected
  • 7.2.4 through 7.2.*Not affected
  • 7.3 and laterNot affected

References

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