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HIGH

net: Fix rcu_tasks stall in threaded busypoll

Published May 8, 2026

Description

I was debugging a NIC driver when I noticed that when I enable threaded busypoll, bpftrace hangs when starting up. dmesg showed:

rcu_tasks_wait_gp: rcu_tasks grace period number 85 (since boot) is 10658 jiffies old. rcu_tasks_wait_gp: rcu_tasks grace period number 85 (since boot) is 40793 jiffies old. rcu_tasks_wait_gp: rcu_tasks grace period number 85 (since boot) is 131273 jiffies old. rcu_tasks_wait_gp: rcu_tasks grace period number 85 (since boot) is 402058 jiffies old. INFO: rcu_tasks detected stalls on tasks: 00000000769f52cd: .N nvcsw: 2/2 holdout: 1 idle_cpu: -1/64 task:napi/eth2-8265 state:R running task stack:0 pid:48300 tgid:48300 ppid:2 task_flags:0x208040 flags:0x00004000 Call Trace: <TASK> ? napi_threaded_poll_loop+0x27c/0x2c0 ? __pfx_napi_threaded_poll+0x10/0x10 ? napi_threaded_poll+0x26/0x80 ? kthread+0xfa/0x240 ? __pfx_kthread+0x10/0x10 ? ret_from_fork+0x31/0x50 ? __pfx_kthread+0x10/0x10 ? ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30 </TASK>

The cause is that in threaded busypoll, the main loop is in napi_threaded_poll rather than napi_threaded_poll_loop, where the latter rarely iterates more than once within its loop. For rcu_softirq_qs_periodic inside napi_threaded_poll_loop to report its qs state, the last_qs must be 100ms behind, and this can't happen because napi_threaded_poll_loop rarely iterates in threaded busypoll, and each time napi_threaded_poll_loop is called last_qs is reset to latest jiffies.

This patch changes so that in threaded busypoll, last_qs is saved in the outer napi_threaded_poll, and whether busy_poll_last_qs is NULL indicates whether napi_threaded_poll_loop is called for busypoll. This way last_qs would not reset to latest jiffies on each invocation of napi_threaded_poll_loop.

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Weaknesses (1)

References (8)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner Linux
Published May 8, 2026
Updated Aug 5, 2026
Reserved May 1, 2026
NVD
Status Analyzed
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Low
Public date May 8, 2026
ENISA EUVD
Assigner Linux
Published May 8, 2026
Updated Aug 5, 2026
Exploited since n/a
EUVD-2026-28691