CVE-2021-47256 - CVE House
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Status published Medium CVE-2021-47256

mm/memory-failure: make sure wait for page writeback in memory_failure

Vulnerability Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/memory-failure: make sure wait for page writeback in memory_failure Our syzkaller trigger the "BUG_ON(!list_empty(&inode->i_wb_list))" in clear_inode: kernel BUG at fs/inode.c:519! Internal error: Oops - BUG: 0 [#1] SMP Modules linked in: Process syz-executor.0 (pid: 249, stack limit = 0x00000000a12409d7) CPU: 1 PID: 249 Comm: syz-executor.0 Not tainted 4.19.95 Hardware name: linux,dummy-virt (DT) pstate: 80000005 (Nzcv daif -PAN -UAO) pc : clear_inode+0x280/0x2a8 lr : clear_inode+0x280/0x2a8 Call trace: clear_inode+0x280/0x2a8 ext4_clear_inode+0x38/0xe8 ext4_free_inode+0x130/0xc68 ext4_evict_inode+0xb20/0xcb8 evict+0x1a8/0x3c0 iput+0x344/0x460 do_unlinkat+0x260/0x410 __arm64_sys_unlinkat+0x6c/0xc0 el0_svc_common+0xdc/0x3b0 el0_svc_handler+0xf8/0x160 el0_svc+0x10/0x218 Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception A crash dump of this problem show that someone called __munlock_pagevec to clear page LRU without lock_page: do_mmap -> mmap_region -> do_munmap -> munlock_vma_pages_range -> __munlock_pagevec. As a result memory_failure will call identify_page_state without wait_on_page_writeback. And after truncate_error_page clear the mapping of this page. end_page_writeback won't call sb_clear_inode_writeback to clear inode->i_wb_list. That will trigger BUG_ON in clear_inode! Fix it by checking PageWriteback too to help determine should we skip wait_on_page_writeback.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

Linux
Vulnerable Versions:
0bc1f8b0682caa39f45ce1e0228ebf43acb46111, 3.16, 0, 4.14.238, 4.19.196, 5.4.128, 5.10.46, 5.12.13, 5.13

Timeline

Official Publish: May 21st, 2024
Last Modified: May 11th, 2026
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.