Re: CVE-2024-46839: workqueue: Improve scalability of workqueue watchdog touch

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>]

On Tue 01-10-24 10:22:51, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 10:02:02AM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
> > On Fri 2024-09-27 14:40:07, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > Description
> > > ===========
> > > 
> > > In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
> > > 
> > > workqueue: Improve scalability of workqueue watchdog touch
> > > 
> > > On a ~2000 CPU powerpc system, hard lockups have been observed in the
> > > workqueue code when stop_machine runs (in this case due to CPU hotplug).
> > 
> > I believe that this does not qualify as a security vulnerability.
> > Any hotplug is a privileged operation.
> 
> Really?  I see that happen on many embedded systems all the time, they
> add/remove CPUs while the device runs/sleeps constantly.

This is a powerpc specific fix. Other architectures are not affected.
 
> Now to be fair, right now an "embedded system" usually doesn't have 2000
> cpus, but what's wrong with marking this real bugfix as a vulnerability
> resolution?

Yes, this is indeed a scalability fix for huge systems with a lot of
CPUs anybody owning those systems was simply not able to use memory
hotplug without seeing those hard lockup messages. The system is not
really locked up. The progress of the hotplug operation is just utterly
slow. Calling this a vulnerability is a stretch IMHO. 

The only potential attack vector is to have machine configured to panic
on hard lockups on those huge ppc systems and allow cpu hotremove to an
adversary which in itsels seems like a very bad idea anyway because
availability of such a system is then effectively compromised.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs