CVE-2026-64525

Summary

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

xfrm: move policy_bydst RCU sync from per-netns .exit to .pre_exit

The struct pernet_operations docstring in include/net/net_namespace.h explicitly warns against blocking RCU primitives in .exit handlers:

Exit methods using blocking RCU primitives, such as
synchronize_rcu(), should be implemented via exit_batch.
[...]
Please, avoid synchronize_rcu() at all, where it's possible.

Note that a combination of pre_exit() and exit() can
be used, since a synchronize_rcu() is guaranteed between
the calls.

xfrm_policy_fini() violates this: it calls synchronize_rcu() before freeing the policy_bydst hash tables (so no RCU reader is mid- traversal at free time), but runs from xfrm_net_ops.exit – once per namespace – so a cleanup_net() of N namespaces pays N full RCU grace periods serially.

Use the documented pre_exit/exit split. Move the policy flush (and the workqueue drains it depends on) into a new .pre_exit handler; xfrm_policy_fini() then runs in .exit and frees the hash tables after the synchronize_rcu_expedited() that cleanup_net() guarantees between the two phases. Providing O(1) RCU grace periods per batch instead of O(N).

Observed on Linux 6.18 with a workload doing unshare(CLONE_NEWNET) at ~13/sec sustained: cleanup_net() and the netns_wq rescuer kthread both stuck in xfrm_policy_fini()'s synchronize_rcu(), >300k struct net accumulated in the cleanup queue, Percpu in /proc/meminfo climbed to 130+ GB on 256-CPU hosts, and memcg OOMs followed. setup_net and __put_net counts were balanced, ruling out a refcount leak.

Affected Software

Weaknesses

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bca6386dc08750fc7cdcbc7683473748ba3114b9
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/91cc13978ab0bc6f669139f53e7e613a860d10e0
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d14ae8ef88c2c6590e107db61b6adce148cec7b3
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3e52417318473782012b236d0325bf7d2266a597

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