ceph: do not repeat ceph_trim_dentries() if no progress possible

Overview

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

ceph: do not repeat ceph_trim_dentries() if no progress possible

ceph_cap_reclaim_work() re-queues itself for as long as ceph_trim_dentries() returns -EAGAIN, which happens whenever a lease walk exhausts its nr_to_scan budget. This creates a busy loop that consumes CPU without making any progress when there is nothing to reclaim: with no cap pressure (count==0) and every scanned lease still valid, each pass runs the full scan budget down to zero and returns -EAGAIN, only to be queued again immediately.

The dir-lease walk made this worse. When expire_dir_lease is false (i.e. we have no intention of reclaiming dir leases), __dir_lease_check() returned TOUCH for every valid lease. TOUCH moves the dentry to the tail of the list and resets di->time via __dentry_dir_lease_touch(), so a walk over N valid leases pointlessly rewrote the list, refreshed the timestamps (preventing them from ever aging out) and always drained nr_to_scan, guaranteeing the -EAGAIN requeue.

Fix this in three steps:

• Return KEEP instead of TOUCH when expire_dir_lease is false. If we are not going to reclaim the lease, leave it in place instead of churning the list and resetting its timestamp; the walk then terminates naturally (or via STOP at the first fresh lease).

• Only return -EAGAIN from the first (dentry-lease) walk when something was actually freed. A full batch that frees nothing means retrying the same list immediately is futile; fall through to the dir-lease walk instead.

• After both walks, bail out with success (0) when nothing was freed and there is no cap pressure (count==0). There is no reason to keep retrying when we are not over the cap limit and made no progress.

Under real cap pressure (count>0) the reclaim path is unchanged and still retries via -EAGAIN.

Without this patch, I saw 500 ceph_trim_dentries() calls per second on our web servers. This is very visible in /proc/lock_stat (5 minute capture):

          class name    con-bounces    contentions   waittime-min   waittime-max waittime-total   waittime-avg    acq-bounces   acquisitions   holdtime-min   holdtime-max holdtime-total   holdtime-avg

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock: 126180 128218 0.04 8063.44 15986965.20 124.69 1573354 5296812 0.04 8291.28 74164526.48 14.00

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock 111736 [<000000007b11e319>] __ceph_dentry_dir_lease_touch+0x7c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 2631 [<0000000050597999>] __dentry_leases_walk+0x64/0x2c8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 3878 [<00000000c0022f62>] __ceph_dentry_lease_touch+0x5c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 9973 [<000000002f27cb6f>] __dentry_lease_unlist+0x50/0xa0

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock 123621 [<0000000050597999>] __dentry_leases_walk+0x64/0x2c8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 1822 [<000000007b11e319>] __ceph_dentry_dir_lease_touch+0x7c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 2720 [<000000002f27cb6f>] __dentry_lease_unlist+0x50/0xa0 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 55 [<00000000c0022f62>] __ceph_dentry_lease_touch+0x5c/0xa8

With this patch:

          class name    con-bounces    contentions   waittime-min   waittime-max waittime-total   waittime-avg    acq-bounces   acquisitions   holdtime-min   holdtime-max holdtime-total   holdtime-avg

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock: 1203 1215 0.16 408.88 33082.88 27.23 4320501 7357389 0.04 500.64 1961578.00 0.27

&mdsc->dentry_list_lock 1029 [<000000003c9aea8a>] __ceph_dentry_dir_lease_touch+0x7c/0xa8 &mdsc->dentry_list_lock 1 ---truncated---

Affected

• Linux >= 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e < dd2e9824e5e7dba406005ff779a107f773175a76
• Linux >= 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e < 5a541eb401acb89d791da41189d7a79220164b93
• Linux >= 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e < 37d6edb2f03b29399a3a337fae78674de51e1695
• Linux >= 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e < 3d122b2feb1dd76bb5041bdea5e1e1b007d8d415
• Linux >= 37c4efc1ddf98ba8b234d116d863a9464445901e < e7d7aa7b730178278109c41fa1b17b06873065d5
• Linux 5.1

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.

Vendor advisories

• Red Hat VEX · Low · affected: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · no fix planned: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · updated 2026-09-18 · vex