CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-21807 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: block: fix queue freeze vs limits lock order in sysfs store methods queue_attr_store() always freezes a device queue before calling the attribute store operation. For attributes that control queue limits, the store operation will also lock the queue limits with a call to queue_limits_start_update(). However, some drivers (e.g. SCSI sd) may need to issue commands to a device to obtain limit values from the hardware with the queue limits locked. This creates a potential ABBA deadlock situation if a user attempts to modify a limit (thus freezing the device queue) while the device driver starts a revalidation of the device queue limits. Avoid such deadlock by not freezing the queue before calling the ->store_limit() method in struct queue_sysfs_entry and instead use the queue_limits_commit_update_frozen helper to freeze the queue after taking the limits lock. This also removes taking the sysfs lock for the store_limit method as it doesn't protect anything here, but creates even more nesting. Hopefully it will go away from the actual sysfs methods entirely soon. (commit log adapted from a similar patch from Damien Le M…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-02-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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