Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98536
Go to dashboardThe writeback cleanup worker for dying cgroups can run for minutes without reporting a Tasks-RCU quiescent state, so callers waiting on that grace period (such as BPF or ftrace detach) can hang. A host can be hung-task panicked as a result, which is a denial of service rather than code execution.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
The sources describe a Linux kernel fix in the writeback code, not a list of affected versions. Hosts running kernels with CONFIG_PREEMPTION and PREEMPT_DYNAMIC in full or lazy mode, with many attached inodes in dying cgroups, and BPF or ftrace detaches in use are the scenario described. unknown for exact versions.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
Unknown from the sources.
Unknown from the sources.
Each row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
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.
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