CVE-2024-57839

Technical Description

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

Revert "readahead: properly shorten readahead when falling back to do_page_cache_ra()"

This reverts commit 7c877586da3178974a8a94577b6045a48377ff25.

Anders and Philippe have reported that recent kernels occasionally hang

when used with NFS in readahead code. The problem has been bisected to

7c877586da3 ("readahead: properly shorten readahead when falling back to

do_page_cache_ra()"). The cause of the problem is that ra->size can be

shrunk by read_pages() call and subsequently we end up calling

do_page_cache_ra() with negative (read huge positive) number of pages.

Let's revert 7c877586da3 for now until we can find a proper way how the

logic in read_pages() and page_cache_ra_order() can coexist. This can

lead to reduced readahead throughput due to readahead window confusion but

that's better than outright hangs.

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References