Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-21816 json

hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING

published 2025-02-27 20 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-5973

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 10%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING

hrtimers are migrated away from the dying CPU to any online target at the CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING stage in order not to delay bandwidth timers handling tasks involved in the CPU hotplug forward progress.

However wakeups can still be performed by the outgoing CPU after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING. Those can result again in bandwidth timers being armed. Depending on several considerations (crystal ball power management based election, earliest timer already enqueued, timer migration enabled or not), the target may eventually be the current CPU even if offline. If that happens, the timer is eventually ignored.

The most notable example is RCU which had to deal with each and every of those wake-ups by deferring them to an online CPU, along with related workarounds:

_ e787644caf76 (rcu: Defer RCU kthreads wakeup when CPU is dying) _ 9139f93209d1 (rcu/nocb: Fix RT throttling hrtimer armed from offline CPU) _ f7345ccc62a4 (rcu/nocb: Fix rcuog wake-up from offline softirq)

The problem isn't confined to RCU though as the stop machine kthread (which runs CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING) reports its completion at the end of its work through cpu_stop_signal_done() and performs a wake up that eventually arms the deadline server timer:

WARNING: CPU: 94 PID: 588 at kernel/time/hrtimer.c:1086 hrtimer_start_range_ns+0x289/0x2d0 CPU: 94 UID: 0 PID: 588 Comm: migration/94 Not tainted Stopper: multi_cpu_stop+0x0/0x120 <- stop_machine_cpuslocked+0x66/0xc0 RIP: 0010:hrtimer_start_range_ns+0x289/0x2d0 Call Trace: <TASK> start_dl_timer enqueue_dl_entity dl_server_start enqueue_task_fair enqueue_task ttwu_do_activate try_to_wake_up complete cpu_stopper_thread

Instead of providing yet another bandaid to work around the situation, fix it in the hrtimers infrastructure instead: always migrate away a timer to an online target whenever it is enqueued from an offline CPU.

This will also allow to revert all the above RCU disgraceful hacks.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 4.20, 5.5, 5.11, 5.16, 6.1.141, 6.6.93, 6.12.14, 6.13.3, 6.14
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.147-1
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.12.15-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-21816

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-64.67
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1032.34
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1033.35
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1028.32
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1029.29
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1034.39
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1015.17
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1031.35

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-21816

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-rt Linux Micro 6.2 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-64kb SLES 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-source SLES 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-default SLES 16.0, SLE High Availability Extension 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2 +1 more 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-default-base SLES 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1.160000.2.4
  • kernel-syms SLES 16.0, Linux Micro Extras 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-obs-qa SLES for SAP applications 16.0, SLES 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-kvmsmall SLES for SAP applications 16.0, SLES 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:21080-1SUSE-SU-2025:21147-1SUSE-SU-2025:21180-1SUSE-SU-2026:20561-1

  • kernel-rt openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • dtb-aarch64 openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-64kb openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-syms openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-obs-qa openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-source openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-default openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1
  • kernel-kvmsmall openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.7.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2025:20091-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-21816 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +82 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.21% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 10% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.