Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability · CVE-2026-98536

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: writeback: report a Tasks-RCU quiescent state per cgwb drain pass cleanup_offline_cgwbs_workfn() dr…

Published Oct 18, 2026 · catalog updated Oct 18, 2026 · the affected product

Open the advisory

Exploitation likelihood is not on this record for CVE-2026-98536. A missing EPSS score is not a low risk. Compare the affected product with the linked advisory before you change production.

Severity

Unknown—

Known exploitation

Not in CISA/VulnCheck KEV

EPSS

Awaiting synchronization with FIRST

Remediation

Not established

Affected products

See sources for product scope

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: writeback: report a Tasks-RCU quiescent state per cgwb drain pass cleanup_offline_cgwbs_workfn() drains a dying cgwb by calling cleanup_offline_cgwb() until it returns false, with a cond_resched() between passes. On a CONFIG_PREEMPTION kernel that cond_resched() does nothing: _cond_resched() is a plain "return 0", and under PREEMPT_DYNAMIC the full and lazy modes disable it. Since commit 7dadeaa6e851 ("sched: Further restrict the preemption modes") those are the only two models on the architectures with PREEMPT_LAZY support, arm64 and x86 among them, so the drain loop never reports a Tasks-RCU quiescent state. A worker draining a cgwb with millions of attached inodes runs for minutes. On a 6.18 arm64 host in lazy mode the cgwb worker drained one dying cgroup's writeback domain for over 11 minutes. A BPF program unlink (bpf_trampoline_unlink_prog -> bpf_trampoline_update -> unregister_ftrace_direct -> ftrace_shutdown -> synchronize_rcu_tasks()) waited on that grace period while holding the trampoline mutex, 42 tasks queued behind it in D state, and the hung task detector fired at 614 s and panicked the host. Any BPF or ftrace detach during a long drain inherits the drain's length. Fix this by calling cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() so we do not stall out anybody who calls sycnrhonize_rcu_tasks(). We put this in a do { } while loop because if we have many small cgroups cleanup_offline_cgwb() will return false and we will never call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), creating the same problem.

No affected version ranges are stored yet. Use the vendor advisory before you decide this record does not apply.