CVE-2023-53151 md/raid10: prevent soft lockup while flush writes
An attacker can cause a soft lockup and denial of service in the Linux kernel's RAID10 module by triggering excessive write operations.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-53151?
CVE-2023-53151 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 15 Sep 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
md/raid10: prevent soft lockup while flush writes
Currently, there is no limit for raid1/raid10 plugged bio. While flushing writes, raid1 has cond_resched() while raid10 doesn't, and too many writes can cause soft lockup.
Follow up soft lockup can be triggered easily with writeback test for raid10 with ramdisks:
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#10 stuck for 27s! [md0_raid10:1293] Call Trace: <TASK> call_rcu+0x16/0x20 put_object+0x41/0x80 __delete_object+0x50/0x90 delete_object_full+0x2b/0x40 kmemleak_free+0x46/0xa0 slab_free_freelist_hook.constprop.0+0xed/0x1a0 kmem_cache_free+0xfd/0x300 mempool_free_slab+0x1f/0x30 mempool_free+0x3a/0x100 bio_free+0x59/0x80 bio_put+0xcf/0x2c0 free_r10bio+0xbf/0xf0 raid_end_bio_io+0x78/0xb0 one_write_done+0x8a/0xa0 raid10_end_write_request+0x1b4/0x430 bio_endio+0x175/0x320 brd_submit_bio+0x3b9/0x9b7 [brd] __submit_bio+0x69/0xe0 submit_bio_noacct_nocheck+0x1e6/0x5a0 submit_bio_noacct+0x38c/0x7e0 flush_pending_writes+0xf0/0x240 raid10d+0xac/0x1ed0
Fix the problem by adding cond_resched() to raid10 like what raid1 did.
Note that unlimited plugged bio still need to be optimized, for example, in the case of lots of dirty pages writeback, this will take lots of memory and io will spend a long time in plug, hence io latency is bad.
Weakness: CWE-667
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-53151?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2023-53151?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2023-53151 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-53151 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-53151, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53151, GHSA-c65j-9jmw-78h6, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-53151.