hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING
Summary
hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING
Original description
The description as published by the source.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING
hrtimers are migrated away from the dying CPU to any online target at
the CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING stage in order not to delay bandwidth timers
handling tasks involved in the CPU hotplug forward progress.
However wakeups can still be performed by the outgoing CPU after
CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING. Those can result again in bandwidth timers being
armed. Depending on several considerations (crystal ball power management
based election, earliest timer already enqueued, timer migration enabled or
not), the target may eventually be the current CPU even if offline. If that
happens, the timer is eventually ignored.
The most notable example is RCU which had to deal with each and every of
those wake-ups by deferring them to an online CPU, along with related
workarounds:
_ e787644caf76 (rcu: Defer RCU kthreads wakeup when CPU is dying)
_ 9139f93209d1 (rcu/nocb: Fix RT throttling hrtimer armed from offline CPU)
_ f7345ccc62a4 (rcu/nocb: Fix rcuog wake-up from offline softirq)
The problem isn't confined to RCU though as the stop machine kthread
(which runs CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING) reports its completion at the end
of its work through cpu_stop_signal_done() and performs a wake up that
eventually arms the deadline server timer:
WARNING: CPU: 94 PID: 588 at kernel/time/hrtimer.c:1086 hrtimer_start_range_ns+0x289/0x2d0
CPU: 94 UID: 0 PID: 588…
Affected packages
Fix status by distribution
Fixed packages published by each distribution for this CVE
- BellSoft Alpaquita BELL-CVE-2025-21816 linux-lts Fixed in: 6.1.141-r0
- Debian DEBIAN-CVE-2025-21816 linux
- Ubuntu UBUNTU-CVE-2025-21816 linux-hwe-edge
References
- advisory github.com
- advisory nvd.nist.gov
- package git.kernel.org
- web git.kernel.org
- web git.kernel.org
- web git.kernel.org
- web git.kernel.org
- web git.kernel.org
- web lists.debian.org