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Fencer Vulns
no cvss —

CVE-2025-40007 json

netfs: fix reference leak

published 2025-10-20 12 mo ago modified 2026-10-19 20 d ago also EUVD-2025-35073

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 13%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

netfs: fix reference leak

Commit 20d72b00ca81 ("netfs: Fix the request's work item to not require a ref") modified netfs_alloc_request() to initialize the reference counter to 2 instead of 1. The rationale was that the requet's "work" would release the second reference after completion (via netfs_{read,write}_collection_worker()). That works most of the time if all goes well.

However, it leaks this additional reference if the request is released before the I/O operation has been submitted: the error code path only decrements the reference counter once and the work item will never be queued because there will never be a completion.

This has caused outages of our whole server cluster today because tasks were blocked in netfs_wait_for_outstanding_io(), leading to deadlocks in Ceph (another bug that I will address soon in another patch). This was caused by a netfs_pgpriv2_begin_copy_to_cache() call which failed in fscache_begin_write_operation(). The leaked netfs_io_request was never completed, leaving `netfs_inode.io_count` with a positive value forever.

All of this is super-fragile code. Finding out which code paths will lead to an eventual completion and which do not is hard to see:

- Some functions like netfs_create_write_req() allocate a request, but will never submit any I/O.

- netfs_unbuffered_read_iter_locked() calls netfs_unbuffered_read() and then netfs_put_request(); however, netfs_unbuffered_read() can also fail early before submitting the I/O request, therefore another netfs_put_request() call must be added there.

A rule of thumb is that functions that return a `netfs_io_request` do not submit I/O, and all of their callers must be checked.

For my taste, the whole netfs code needs an overhaul to make reference counting easier to understand and less fragile & obscure. But to fix this bug here and now and produce a patch that is adequate for a stable backport, I tried a minimal approach that quickly frees the request object upon early failure.

I decided against adding a second netfs_put_request() each time because that would cause code duplication which obscures the code further. Instead, I added the function netfs_put_failed_request() which frees such a failed request synchronously under the assumption that the reference count is exactly 2 (as initially set by netfs_alloc_request() and never touched), verified by a WARN_ON_ONCE(). It then deinitializes the request object (without going through the "cleanup_work" indirection) and frees the allocation (with RCU protection to protect against concurrent access by netfs_requests_seq_start()).

All code paths that fail early have been changed to call netfs_put_failed_request() instead of netfs_put_request(). Additionally, I have added a netfs_put_request() call to netfs_unbuffered_read() as explained above because the netfs_put_failed_request() approach does not work there.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.16, 6.16.10, 6.17
  • linux Debian 14 6.16.10-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-40007

  • linux Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-6.6
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1003.3
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1003.3
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1006.6
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1004.4
  • linux-riscv Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-6.6.1
  • linux-oracle Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1003.3
  • linux-realtime Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1002.3

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-40007

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

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-2025-40007 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: netfs: fix reference leak

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • 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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 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

0.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 13% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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