vulnerability

Red Hat: CVE-2024-42102: kernel: Revert "mm/writeback: fix possible divide-by-zero in wb_dirty_limits(), again" (Multiple Advisories)

Severity
4
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:M/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
Jul 30, 2024
Added
Sep 6, 2024
Modified
Sep 1, 2025

Description

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

Revert "mm/writeback: fix possible divide-by-zero in wb_dirty_limits(), again"

Patch series "mm: Avoid possible overflows in dirty throttling".

Dirty throttling logic assumes dirty limits in page units fit into
32-bits. This patch series makes sure this is true (see patch 2/2 for
more details).

This patch (of 2):

This reverts commit 9319b647902cbd5cc884ac08a8a6d54ce111fc78.

The commit is broken in several ways. Firstly, the removed (u64) cast
from the multiplication will introduce a multiplication overflow on 32-bit
archs if wb_thresh * bg_thresh >= 1<<32 (which is actually common - the
default settings with 4GB of RAM will trigger this). Secondly, the
div64_u64() is unnecessarily expensive on 32-bit archs. We have
div64_ul() in case we want to be safe & cheap. Thirdly, if dirty
thresholds are larger than 1<<32 pages, then dirty balancing is going to
blow up in many other spectacular ways anyway so trying to fix one
possible overflow is just moot.

Solutions

no-fix-redhat-rpm-packageredhat-upgrade-kernelredhat-upgrade-kernel-rt
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