CVE-2025-37859 page_pool: avoid infinite loop to schedule delayed worker

What is CVE-2025-37859?

CVE-2025-37859 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 9 May 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:

page_pool: avoid infinite loop to schedule delayed worker

We noticed the kworker in page_pool_release_retry() was waken up repeatedly and infinitely in production because of the buggy driver causing the inflight less than 0 and warning us in page_pool_inflight()[1].

Since the inflight value goes negative, it means we should not expect the whole page_pool to get back to work normally.

This patch mitigates the adverse effect by not rescheduling the kworker when detecting the inflight negative in page_pool_release_retry().

[1] [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] Negative(-51446) inflight packet-pages ... [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] Call Trace: [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] page_pool_release_retry+0x23/0x70 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] process_one_work+0x1b1/0x370 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] worker_thread+0x37/0x3a0 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] kthread+0x11a/0x140 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] ? process_one_work+0x370/0x370 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] ? __kthread_cancel_work+0x40/0x40 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] ret_from_fork+0x35/0x40 [Mon Feb 10 20:36:11 2025] ---[ end trace ebffe800f33e7e34 ]--- Note: before this patch, the above calltrace would flood the dmesg due to repeated reschedule of release_dw kworker.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-37859?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2025-37859?

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-2025-37859 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-37859 in the wild and no public exploit code.

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All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-37859, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-37859, GHSA-74cg-cw39-rj4g, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2025-37859, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2025-37859, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2025-37859 and 1 more.