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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Sep 17, 2025· Updated Jan 14, 2026

tracing: Fix race issue between cpu buffer write and swap

CVE-2023-53368

Description

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

tracing: Fix race issue between cpu buffer write and swap

Warning happened in rb_end_commit() at code: if (RB_WARN_ON(cpu_buffer, !local_read(&cpu_buffer->committing)))

WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 139 at kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c:3142 rb_commit+0x402/0x4a0 Call Trace: ring_buffer_unlock_commit+0x42/0x250 trace_buffer_unlock_commit_regs+0x3b/0x250 trace_event_buffer_commit+0xe5/0x440 trace_event_buffer_reserve+0x11c/0x150 trace_event_raw_event_sched_switch+0x23c/0x2c0 __traceiter_sched_switch+0x59/0x80 __schedule+0x72b/0x1580 schedule+0x92/0x120 worker_thread+0xa0/0x6f0

It is because the race between writing event into cpu buffer and swapping cpu buffer through file per_cpu/cpu0/snapshot:

Write on CPU 0 Swap buffer by per_cpu/cpu0/snapshot on CPU 1 -------- -------- tracing_snapshot_write() [...]

ring_buffer_lock_reserve() cpu_buffer = buffer->buffers[cpu]; // 1. Suppose find 'cpu_buffer_a'; [...] rb_reserve_next_event() [...]

ring_buffer_swap_cpu() if (local_read(&cpu_buffer_a->committing)) goto out_dec; if (local_read(&cpu_buffer_b->committing)) goto out_dec; buffer_a->buffers[cpu] = cpu_buffer_b; buffer_b->buffers[cpu] = cpu_buffer_a; // 2. cpu_buffer has swapped here.

rb_start_commit(cpu_buffer); if (unlikely(READ_ONCE(cpu_buffer->buffer) != buffer)) { // 3. This check passed due to 'cpu_buffer->buffer' [...] // has not changed here. return NULL; } cpu_buffer_b->buffer = buffer_a; cpu_buffer_a->buffer = buffer_b; [...]

// 4. Reserve event from 'cpu_buffer_a'.

ring_buffer_unlock_commit() [...] cpu_buffer = buffer->buffers[cpu]; // 5. Now find 'cpu_buffer_b' !!! rb_commit(cpu_buffer) rb_end_commit() // 6. WARN for the wrong 'committing' state !!!

Based on above analysis, we can easily reproduce by following testcase: `` bash #!/bin/bash dmesg -n 7 sysctl -w kernel.panic_on_warn=1 TR=/sys/kernel/tracing echo 7 > ${TR}/buffer_size_kb echo "sched:sched_switch" > ${TR}/set_event while [ true ]; do echo 1 > ${TR}/per_cpu/cpu0/snapshot done & while [ true ]; do echo 1 > ${TR}/per_cpu/cpu0/snapshot done & while [ true ]; do echo 1 > ${TR}/per_cpu/cpu0/snapshot done & ``

To fix it, IIUC, we can use smp_call_function_single() to do the swap on the target cpu where the buffer is located, so that above race would be avoided.

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