CVE-2021-47256: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/memory-failure: make sure wait for page writeback in memory_failure Our syzkaller trigger the "BUG_ON(!list_empty(&inode->i_wb_list))" in clear_inode: kernel BUG at fs/inode.c:519! Internal error: Oops - BUG: 0 [#1] SMP Modules linked in: Process syz-executor.0 (pid: 249, stack limit = 0x00000000a12409d7) CPU: 1 PID: 249 Comm: syz-executor.0 Not tainted 4.19.95 Hardware name: linux,dummy-virt (DT) pstate: 80000005 (Nzcv daif -PAN -UAO) pc : clear_inode+0x280/0x2a8 lr : clear_inode+0x280/0x2a8 Call trace: clear_inode+0x280/0x2a8 ext4_clear_inode+0x38/0xe8 ext4_free_inode+0x130/0xc68 ext4_evict_inode+0xb20/0xcb8 evict+0x1a8/0x3c0 iput+0x344/0x460 do_unlinkat+0x260/0x410 __arm64_sys_unlinkat+0x6c/0xc0 el0_svc_common+0xdc/0x3b0 el0_svc_handler+0xf8/0x160 el0_svc+0x10/0x218 Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception A crash dump of this problem show that someone called __munlock_pagevec to clear page LRU without lock_page: do_mmap -> mmap_region -> do_munmap -> munlock_vma_pages_range -> __munlock_pagevec. As a result memory_failure will call identify_page_state without wait_on_page_writeback. And after truncate_error_page clear the mapping of this page. end_page_writeback won't call sb_clear_inode_writeback to clear inode->i_wb_list. That will trigger BUG_ON in clear_inode! Fix it by checking PageWriteback too to help determine should we skip wait_on_page_writeback.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 3.16, before 4.14.238 (fixed in 4.14.238); from 4.15, before 4.19.196 (fixed in 4.19.196); from 4.20, before 5.4.128 (fixed in 5.4.128); from 5.5, before 5.10.46 (fixed in 5.10.46); from 5.11, before 5.12.13 (fixed in 5.12.13); version 5.13 only

Published 2024-05-21. Last modified 2026-06-17.