NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel-rt package, versions *

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-rt package and not the kernel-rt package as distributed by Centos. See How to fix? for Centos:7 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

sched/fair: Fix fault in reweight_entity

Syzbot found a GPF in reweight_entity. This has been bisected to commit 4ef0c5c6b5ba ("kernel/sched: Fix sched_fork() access an invalid sched_task_group")

There is a race between sched_post_fork() and setpriority(PRIO_PGRP) within a thread group that causes a null-ptr-deref in reweight_entity() in CFS. The scenario is that the main process spawns number of new threads, which then call setpriority(PRIO_PGRP, 0, -20), wait, and exit. For each of the new threads the copy_process() gets invoked, which adds the new task_struct and calls sched_post_fork() for it.

In the above scenario there is a possibility that setpriority(PRIO_PGRP) and set_one_prio() will be called for a thread in the group that is just being created by copy_process(), and for which the sched_post_fork() has not been executed yet. This will trigger a null pointer dereference in reweight_entity(), as it will try to access the run queue pointer, which hasn't been set.

Before the mentioned change the cfs_rq pointer for the task has been set in sched_fork(), which is called much earlier in copy_process(), before the new task is added to the thread_group. Now it is done in the sched_post_fork(), which is called after that. To fix the issue the remove the update_load param from the update_load param() function and call reweight_task() only if the task flag doesn't have the TASK_NEW flag set.

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-48921
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/13765de8148f71fa795e0a6607de37c49ea5915a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/589a954daab5e18399860b6c8ffaeaf79844eb20
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8f317cd888059c59e2fa924bf4b0957cfa53f78e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e0bcd6b5779352aed88f2e538a82a39f1a7715bb