Linux Kernel Daily: Locking Bugs Under the Microscope
Today's merges into 7.3-rc3 are dominated by a cluster of reference-counting and locking fixes across the namespace tree, exec path, and networking filesystem code, several tied to real crash reports rather than routine cleanup.
Duration: PT2M16S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-09-10T06:01:20Z
- Audio duration: PT2M16S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning. It's September 10th, 2026, and this is Linux Kernel Daily.
The signal today is locking and lifetime bugs — code that holds a lock or a reference longer than it should, with real crash traces to prove it.
Start with the namespace tree. Norbert Szetei found that listns could take a reference on a namespace before checking if the caller was even allowed to see it, and the cleanup path could then drop that reference while still holding an RCU read lock — triggering a scheduling-while-atomic warning. Commit 56ea4e8 fixes…
Related theme: exec. Jann Horn's commit e780259 moves the close-on-exec step out from under the exec update lock. Closing a file can block on a slow or hung filesystem, and that lock is used all over process-inspection code — so a stuck filesystem, or a FUSE server inspecting its own caller, could deadlock the whole…
The bigger vfs pull, tag 7.3-rc3.fixes from Christian Brauner, folds in both of those plus a long tail of similar issues — a double-unmap bug in AFS directory handling, a use-after-free in reboot's cad_pid, a subrequest reference leak in netfs, and an uninitialized return value in unbuffered writes. Different…
Landlock's pull, from Mickaël…
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