linux-stable.git/kernel/exit.c, branch v5.10.262

posix-cpu-timers: Prevent UAF caused by non-leader exec() race

2026-07-30T10:56:00+00:00

commit 920f893f735e92ba3a1cd9256899a186b161928d upstream.

Wongi and Jungwoo decoded and reported a non-leader exec() related race
which can result in an UAF:

 sys_timer_delete()			exec()
   posix_cpu_timer_del()
   // Observes old leader
   p = pid_task(pid, pid_type);		de_thread()
   					  switch_leader();
					  release_task(old_leader)
					    __exit_signal(old_leader)
					      sighand = lock(old_leader, sighand);
					      posix_cpu_timers*_exit();
   sighand = lock_task_sighand(p)	      unhash_task(old_leader);
     sh = lock(p, sighand)	    	      old_leader->sighand = NULL;
					      unlock(sighand);
     (p->sighand == NULL)
	unlock(sh)
	return NULL;

   // Returns without action
   if(!sighand)
      return 0;
   free_posix_timer();

This is "harmless" unless the deleted timer was armed and enqueued in
p->signal because on exec() a TGID targeted timer is inherited.

As sys_timer_delete() freed the underlying posix timer object
run_posix_cpu_timers() or any timerqueue related add/delete operations on
other timers will access the freed object's timerqueue node, which results
in an UAF.

There is a similar problem vs. posix_cpu_timer_set(). For regular posix
timers it just transiently returns -ESRCH to user space, but for the use
case in do_cpu_nanosleep() it's the same UAF just that the k_itimer is
allocated on the stack.

Also posix_cpu_timer_rearm() fails to rearm the timer, which means it stops
to expire.

While debating solutions Frederic pointed out another problem:

   posix_cpu_timer_del(tmr)
					__exit_signal(p)
					  posix_cpu_timers*_exit(p);
					  unhash_task(p);
					  p->sighand = NULL;
     sh = lock_task_sighand(p)
        sighand = p->sighand;
	if (!sighand)
	    return NULL;
	lock(sighand);

     if (!sh)
	WARN_ON_ONCE(timer_queued(tmr));

On weakly ordered architectures it is not guaranteed that
posix_cpu_timer_del() will observe the stores in posix_cpu_timers*_exit()
when p->sighand is observed as NULL, which means the WARN() can be a false
positive.

Solve these issues by:

  1) Changing the store in __exit_signal() to smp_store_release().

  2) Adding a smp_acquire__after_ctrl_dep() into the !sighand path
     of lock_task_sighand().

  3) Creating a helper function for looking up the task and locking sighand
     which does not return when sighand == NULL. Instead it retries the
     task lookup and only if that fails it gives up.

  4) Using that helper in the three affected functions.

#1/#2 ensures that the reader side which observes sighand == NULL also
observes all preceeding stores, i.e. the stores in posix_cpu_timers*_exit()
and the ones in unhash_task().

#3 ensures that the above described non-leader exec() situation is handled
gracefully. When the task lookup returns the old leader, but sighand ==
NULL then it retries. In the non-leader exec() case the subsequent task
lookup will observe the new leader due to #1/#2. In normal exit() scenarios
the subsequent lookup fails.

When the task lookup fails, the function also checks whether the timer is
still enqueued and issues a warning if that's the case. Unfortunately there
is nothing which can be done about it, but as the task is already not
longer visible the timer should not be accessed anymore. This check also
requires memory ordering, which is not provided when the first lookup
fails. To achieve that the check is preceeded by a smp_rmb() which pairs
with the smp_wmb() in write_seqlock() in __exit_signal(). That ensures that
the stores in posix_cpu_timers*_exit() are visible.

The history of the non-leader exec() issue goes back to the early days of
posix CPU timers, which stored a pointer to the group leader task in the
timer. That obviously fails when a non-leader exec() switches the leader.
commit e0a70217107e ("posix-cpu-timers: workaround to suppress the problems
with mt exec") added a temporary workaround for that in 2010 which survived
about 10 years. The fix for the workaround changed the task pointer to a
pid pointer, but failed to see the subtle race described above. So the
Fixes tag picks that commit, which seems to be halfways accurate.

Thanks to Frederic Weissbecker, Oleg Nesterov and Peter Zijlstra for
review, feedback and suggestions and to Wongi and Jungwoo for the excellent
bug report and analysis!

Fixes: 55e8c8eb2c7b ("posix-cpu-timers: Store a reference to a pid not a task")
Reported-by: Wongi Lee 
Reported-by: Jungwoo Lee 
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner 
Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov 
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

ptrace: slightly saner 'get_dumpable()' logic

2026-05-15T12:48:07+00:00

commit 31e62c2ebbfdc3fe3dbdf5e02c92a9dc67087a3a upstream.

The 'dumpability' of a task is fundamentally about the memory image of
the task - the concept comes from whether it can core dump or not - and
makes no sense when you don't have an associated mm.

And almost all users do in fact use it only for the case where the task
has a mm pointer.

But we have one odd special case: ptrace_may_access() uses 'dumpable' to
check various other things entirely independently of the MM (typically
explicitly using flags like PTRACE_MODE_READ_FSCREDS).  Including for
threads that no longer have a VM (and maybe never did, like most kernel
threads).

It's not what this flag was designed for, but it is what it is.

The ptrace code does check that the uid/gid matches, so you do have to
be uid-0 to see kernel thread details, but this means that the
traditional "drop capabilities" model doesn't make any difference for
this all.

Make it all make a *bit* more sense by saying that if you don't have a
MM pointer, we'll use a cached "last dumpability" flag if the thread
ever had a MM (it will be zero for kernel threads since it is never
set), and require a proper CAP_SYS_PTRACE capability to override.

Reported-by: Qualys Security Advisory 
Cc: Oleg Nesterov 
Cc: Kees Cook 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

perf: Fix sample vs do_exit()

2025-06-27T10:04:24+00:00

[ Upstream commit 4f6fc782128355931527cefe3eb45338abd8ab39 ]

Baisheng Gao reported an ARM64 crash, which Mark decoded as being a
synchronous external abort -- most likely due to trying to access
MMIO in bad ways.

The crash further shows perf trying to do a user stack sample while in
exit_mmap()'s tlb_finish_mmu() -- i.e. while tearing down the address
space it is trying to access.

It turns out that we stop perf after we tear down the userspace mm; a
receipie for disaster, since perf likes to access userspace for
various reasons.

Flip this order by moving up where we stop perf in do_exit().

Additionally, harden PERF_SAMPLE_CALLCHAIN and PERF_SAMPLE_STACK_USER
to abort when the current task does not have an mm (exit_mm() makes
sure to set current->mm = NULL; before commencing with the actual
teardown). Such that CPU wide events don't trip on this same problem.

Fixes: c5ebcedb566e ("perf: Add ability to attach user stack dump to sample")
Reported-by: Baisheng Gao 
Suggested-by: Mark Rutland 
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) 
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250605110815.GQ39944@noisy.programming.kicks-ass.net
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

mm: optimize the redundant loop of mm_update_owner_next()

2024-07-18T11:05:42+00:00

commit cf3f9a593dab87a032d2b6a6fb205e7f3de4f0a1 upstream.

When mm_update_owner_next() is racing with swapoff (try_to_unuse()) or
/proc or ptrace or page migration (get_task_mm()), it is impossible to
find an appropriate task_struct in the loop whose mm_struct is the same as
the target mm_struct.

If the above race condition is combined with the stress-ng-zombie and
stress-ng-dup tests, such a long loop can easily cause a Hard Lockup in
write_lock_irq() for tasklist_lock.

Recognize this situation in advance and exit early.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240620122123.3877432-1-alexjlzheng@tencent.com
Signed-off-by: Jinliang Zheng 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Christian Brauner 
Cc: Jens Axboe 
Cc: Mateusz Guzik 
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) 
Cc: Oleg Nesterov 
Cc: Tycho Andersen 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

exit: Use READ_ONCE() for all oops/warn limit reads

2023-02-01T07:23:21+00:00

commit 7535b832c6399b5ebfc5b53af5c51dd915ee2538 upstream.

Use a temporary variable to take full advantage of READ_ONCE() behavior.
Without this, the report (and even the test) might be out of sync with
the initial test.

Reported-by: Peter Zijlstra 
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/Y5x7GXeluFmZ8E0E@hirez.programming.kicks-ass.net
Fixes: 9fc9e278a5c0 ("panic: Introduce warn_limit")
Fixes: d4ccd54d28d3 ("exit: Put an upper limit on how often we can oops")
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" 
Cc: Jann Horn 
Cc: Arnd Bergmann 
Cc: Petr Mladek 
Cc: Andrew Morton 
Cc: Luis Chamberlain 
Cc: Marco Elver 
Cc: tangmeng 
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior 
Cc: Tiezhu Yang 
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook 
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers 
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

exit: Allow oops_limit to be disabled

2023-02-01T07:23:20+00:00

commit de92f65719cd672f4b48397540b9f9eff67eca40 upstream.

In preparation for keeping oops_limit logic in sync with warn_limit,
have oops_limit == 0 disable checking the Oops counter.

Cc: Jann Horn 
Cc: Jonathan Corbet 
Cc: Andrew Morton 
Cc: Baolin Wang 
Cc: "Jason A. Donenfeld" 
Cc: Eric Biggers 
Cc: Huang Ying 
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" 
Cc: Arnd Bergmann 
Cc: linux-doc@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook 
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers 
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

exit: Expose "oops_count" to sysfs

2023-02-01T07:23:20+00:00

commit 9db89b41117024f80b38b15954017fb293133364 upstream.

Since Oops count is now tracked and is a fairly interesting signal, add
the entry /sys/kernel/oops_count to expose it to userspace.

Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" 
Cc: Jann Horn 
Cc: Arnd Bergmann 
Reviewed-by: Luis Chamberlain 
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook 
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221117234328.594699-3-keescook@chromium.org
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers 
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

exit: Put an upper limit on how often we can oops

2023-02-01T07:23:20+00:00

commit d4ccd54d28d3c8598e2354acc13e28c060961dbb upstream.

Many Linux systems are configured to not panic on oops; but allowing an
attacker to oops the system **really** often can make even bugs that look
completely unexploitable exploitable (like NULL dereferences and such) if
each crash elevates a refcount by one or a lock is taken in read mode, and
this causes a counter to eventually overflow.

The most interesting counters for this are 32 bits wide (like open-coded
refcounts that don't use refcount_t). (The ldsem reader count on 32-bit
platforms is just 16 bits, but probably nobody cares about 32-bit platforms
that much nowadays.)

So let's panic the system if the kernel is constantly oopsing.

The speed of oopsing 2^32 times probably depends on several factors, like
how long the stack trace is and which unwinder you're using; an empirically
important one is whether your console is showing a graphical environment or
a text console that oopses will be printed to.
In a quick single-threaded benchmark, it looks like oopsing in a vfork()
child with a very short stack trace only takes ~510 microseconds per run
when a graphical console is active; but switching to a text console that
oopses are printed to slows it down around 87x, to ~45 milliseconds per
run.
(Adding more threads makes this faster, but the actual oops printing
happens under &die_lock on x86, so you can maybe speed this up by a factor
of around 2 and then any further improvement gets eaten up by lock
contention.)

It looks like it would take around 8-12 days to overflow a 32-bit counter
with repeated oopsing on a multi-core X86 system running a graphical
environment; both me (in an X86 VM) and Seth (with a distro kernel on
normal hardware in a standard configuration) got numbers in that ballpark.

12 days aren't *that* short on a desktop system, and you'd likely need much
longer on a typical server system (assuming that people don't run graphical
desktop environments on their servers), and this is a *very* noisy and
violent approach to exploiting the kernel; and it also seems to take orders
of magnitude longer on some machines, probably because stuff like EFI
pstore will slow it down a ton if that's active.

Signed-off-by: Jann Horn 
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221107201317.324457-1-jannh@google.com
Reviewed-by: Luis Chamberlain 
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook 
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221117234328.594699-2-keescook@chromium.org
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers 
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

exit: Add and use make_task_dead.

2023-02-01T07:23:19+00:00

commit 0e25498f8cd43c1b5aa327f373dd094e9a006da7 upstream.

There are two big uses of do_exit.  The first is it's design use to be
the guts of the exit(2) system call.  The second use is to terminate
a task after something catastrophic has happened like a NULL pointer
in kernel code.

Add a function make_task_dead that is initialy exactly the same as
do_exit to cover the cases where do_exit is called to handle
catastrophic failure.  In time this can probably be reduced to just a
light wrapper around do_task_dead. For now keep it exactly the same so
that there will be no behavioral differences introducing this new
concept.

Replace all of the uses of do_exit that use it for catastraphic
task cleanup with make_task_dead to make it clear what the code
is doing.

As part of this rename rewind_stack_do_exit
rewind_stack_and_make_dead.

Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" 
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers 
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

io_uring: import 5.15-stable io_uring

2023-01-04T10:39:23+00:00

No upstream commit exists.

This imports the io_uring codebase from 5.15.85, wholesale. Changes
from that code base:

- Drop IOCB_ALLOC_CACHE, we don't have that in 5.10.
- Drop MKDIRAT/SYMLINKAT/LINKAT. Would require further VFS backports,
  and we don't support these in 5.10 to begin with.
- sock_from_file() old style calling convention.
- Use compat_get_bitmap() only for CONFIG_COMPAT=y

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman