Description

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

hrtimers: Force migrate away hrtimers queued after CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING

hrtimers are migrated away from the dying CPU to any online target at
the CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING stage in order not to delay bandwidth timers
handling tasks involved in the CPU hotplug forward progress.

However wakeups can still be performed by the outgoing CPU after
CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING. Those can result again in bandwidth timers being
armed. Depending on several considerations (crystal ball power management
based election, earliest timer already enqueued, timer migration enabled or
not), the target may eventually be the current CPU even if offline. If that
happens, the timer is eventually ignored.

The most notable example is RCU which had to deal with each and every of
those wake-ups by deferring them to an online CPU, along with related
workarounds:

_ e787644caf76 (rcu: Defer RCU kthreads wakeup when CPU is dying)
_ 9139f93209d1 (rcu/nocb: Fix RT throttling hrtimer armed from offline CPU)
_ f7345ccc62a4 (rcu/nocb: Fix rcuog wake-up from offline softirq)

The problem isn't confined to RCU though as the stop machine kthread
(which runs CPUHP_AP_HRTIMERS_DYING) reports its completion at the end
of its work through cpu_stop_signal_done() and performs a wake up that
eventually arms the deadline server timer:

WARNING: CPU: 94 PID: 588 at kernel/time/hrtimer.c:1086 hrtimer_start_range_ns+0x289/0x2d0
CPU: 94 UID: 0 PID: 5...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-21816

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux, Linux

Product: Linux, Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.03% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 4.0% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-03-28 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-21816
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e456a88bddae4030ba962447bb84be6669f2a0c1
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2aecec58e9040ce3d2694707889f9914a2374955
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/53dac345395c0d2493cbc2f4c85fe38aef5b63f5

Timeline