CVE-2025-21908

Technical Description

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

NFS: fix nfs_release_folio() to not deadlock via kcompactd writeback

Add PF_KCOMPACTD flag and current_is_kcompactd() helper to check for it so

nfs_release_folio() can skip calling nfs_wb_folio() from kcompactd.

Otherwise NFS can deadlock waiting for kcompactd enduced writeback which

recurses back to NFS (which triggers writeback to NFSD via NFS loopback

mount on the same host, NFSD blocks waiting for XFS's call to

__filemap_get_folio):

6070.550357] INFO: task kcompactd0:58 blocked for more than 4435 seconds.

{---

[58] "kcompactd0"

[<0>] folio_wait_bit+0xe8/0x200

[<0>] folio_wait_writeback+0x2b/0x80

[<0>] nfs_wb_folio+0x80/0x1b0 [nfs]

[<0>] nfs_release_folio+0x68/0x130 [nfs]

[<0>] split_huge_page_to_list_to_order+0x362/0x840

[<0>] migrate_pages_batch+0x43d/0xb90

[<0>] migrate_pages_sync+0x9a/0x240

[<0>] migrate_pages+0x93c/0x9f0

[<0>] compact_zone+0x8e2/0x1030

[<0>] compact_node+0xdb/0x120

[<0>] kcompactd+0x121/0x

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References