vulnerability

Red Hat: CVE-2024-47660: kernel: fsnotify: clear PARENT_WATCHED flags lazily (Multiple Advisories)

Severity
4
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:M/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
Oct 9, 2024
Added
May 15, 2025
Modified
Mar 27, 2026

Description

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

fsnotify: clear PARENT_WATCHED flags lazily

In some setups directories can have many (usually negative) dentries.
Hence __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags() function can take a
significant amount of time. Since the bulk of this function happens
under inode->i_lock this causes a significant contention on the lock
when we remove the watch from the directory as the
__fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags() call from fsnotify_recalc_mask()
races with __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags() calls from
__fsnotify_parent() happening on children. This can lead upto softlockup
reports reported by users.

Fix the problem by calling fsnotify_update_children_dentry_flags() to
set PARENT_WATCHED flags only when parent starts watching children.

When parent stops watching children, clear false positive PARENT_WATCHED
flags lazily in __fsnotify_parent() for each accessed child.

Solutions

redhat-upgrade-kernelredhat-upgrade-kernel-rt
Title
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