CVE-2024-58057 idpf: convert workqueues to unbound

What is CVE-2024-58057?

CVE-2024-58057 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 6 Mar 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:

idpf: convert workqueues to unbound

When a workqueue is created with `WQ_UNBOUND`, its work items are served by special worker-pools, whose host workers are not bound to any specific CPU. In the default configuration (i.e. when `queue_delayed_work` and friends do not specify which CPU to run the work item on), `WQ_UNBOUND` allows the work item to be executed on any CPU in the same node of the CPU it was enqueued on. While this solution potentially sacrifices locality, it avoids contention with other processes that might dominate the CPU time of the processor the work item was scheduled on.

This is not just a theoretical problem: in a particular scenario misconfigured process was hogging most of the time from CPU0, leaving less than 0.5% of its CPU time to the kworker. The IDPF workqueues that were using the kworker on CPU0 suffered large completion delays as a result, causing performance degradation, timeouts and eventual system crash.

* I have also run a manual test to gauge the performance improvement. The test consists of an antagonist process (`./stress --cpu 2`) consuming as much of CPU 0 as possible. This process is run under `taskset 01` to bind it to CPU0, and its priority is changed with `chrt -pQ 9900 10000 ${pid}` and `renice -n -20 ${pid}` after start.

Then, the IDPF driver is forced to prefer CPU0 by editing all calls to `queue_delayed_work`, `mod_delayed_work`, etc... to use CPU 0.

Finally, `ktraces` for the workqueue events are collected.

Without the current patch, the antagonist process can force arbitrary delays between `workqueue_queue_work` and `workqueue_execute_start`, that in my tests were as high as `30ms`. With the current patch applied, the workqueue can be migrated to another unloaded CPU in the same node, and, keeping everything else equal, the maximum delay I could see was `6us`.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-58057?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2024-58057?

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-2024-58057 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-58057 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BELL-CVE-2024-58057, DEBIAN-CVE-2024-58057, GHSA-25vp-mqrr-hv87, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2024-58057, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-58057.