CVE-2026-98644

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() has no rescheduling point. The batch count bounds how many entries are copied out, not how many buckets are visited, so one BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH call can walk the map end to end. The empty-bucket fast path is worse: it stays inside a single rcu_read_lock() / bpf_disable_instrumentation() section for any run of consecutive empty buckets. That holds up on small maps, but it falls apart at scale. On a 144-CPU arm64 host running a CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE kernel, periodic BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH calls against an LRU hash map with 16,777,216 buckets held a CPU inside the batch op for 77+ seconds and triggered the soft lockup watchdog. Commit 75134f16e7dd ("bpf: Add schedule points in batch ops") fixed this same problem in the generic batch ops, but not in this htab-native path, which every htab-based hash map variant uses for its lookup[_and_delete] batch ops. Complete that fix here. Leave the critical section after 64 consecutive empty buckets, call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), and resume at the saved bucket cursor. No locks are held at that point, and resuming from the cursor is already the function's behavior for non-empty buckets. Add the same call to the per-bucket loop after copy_to_user(), where every lock has been dropped. cond_resched_rcu() is not enough here: sleeping with bpf_prog_active elevated makes tracing programs on that CPU silently skip their invocations. Plain cond_resched() is not enough either. It is a no-op under PREEMPT and PREEMPT_LAZY, the only models arm64 and x86 have offered since commit 7dadeaa6e851 ("sched: Further restrict the preemption modes"). It is also never a Tasks RCU quiescent state, in any model: the reschedule counts as a preemption. The walking task stays a holdout and stalls every synchronize_rcu_tasks() caller, ftrace and BPF trampoline teardown included, until the syscall returns [1]. cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() is the usual tool for that [2]. It reports the quiescent state at each yield and still reschedules as cond_resched() does on PREEMPT_NONE and PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY kernels.

Why is this CVE medium priority?

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Patch details

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v4.0

References

• MITRE
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

• USN-8961-1
• Linux kernel vulnerabilities
• 3 November 2026
• USN-8959-1
• Linux kernel vulnerabilities
• 3 November 2026
• USN-8963-1
• Linux kernel (NVIDIA Tegra) vulnerabilities
• 3 November 2026
• USN-8960-1
• Linux kernel (OEM) vulnerabilities
• 3 November 2026

Other references

• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-98644
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ca5bd55fc508fbb5c08c62206d02237a5b6fc7e8
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/85136bf22404474a815fc0ed26ec0d1cbc1bc3f9
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4e48fe9b1c77966bede0a73feb3059d7595f642d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/77a3b52b4455e6377e549539e757bc55eedefb51
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f0c09de08ec077098b7e1563f2285f1c136cd816
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5c8b1869cb99a32a962388848cd19604fb41263e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/44f9bcb5ab2b268bc763ed3ebec83308b4972936