Affected: Linux

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

net/rds: acquire the fastpath locks in rds_conn_shutdown()

rds_conn_shutdown() quiesces the transmit and receive-refill paths by waiting for RDS_IN_XMIT and RDS_RECV_REFILL to be sampled clear, and then runs the transport shutdown and rds_conn_path_reset(). Sampling the bits clear is not the same as owning them: the moment after the wait_event() returns, rds_send_xmit() can re-acquire RDS_IN_XMIT (or rds_ib_recv_refill() can re-acquire RDS_RECV_REFILL) and run concurrently with the teardown.

The sender does recheck the connection state after taking the lock, but that recheck is a classic store-buffering pattern: teardown writes the state and reads the bit while the sender writes the bit and reads the state. acquire_in_xmit() is only an acquire operation, so on weakly ordered architectures both sides can miss each other's write, and the transmit path then runs while the transport zeroes its rings (e.g. rds_ib_ring_init()) and rds_send_path_reset() rewrites the transmit state under it.

Oracle UEK fixed the same class of crashes - a 14-year tail of BUG_ON()s in rds_ib_sub_signaled(), unexpected op-codes and NULL dereferences in rds_ib_send_cqe_handler() during failover testing - by making the teardown path *acquire* the fastpath bit locks instead of testing them ("rds: Make sure transmit path and connection tear-down does not run concurrently"). Ownership of a single word is decided by RMW atomicity, so…