CVE-2026-98644 — bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch()

Affected: Linux

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

bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch()

__htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() has no rescheduling point. The batch count bounds how many entries are copied out, not how many buckets are visited, so one BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH call can walk the map end to end. The empty-bucket fast path is worse: it stays inside a single rcu_read_lock() / bpf_disable_instrumentation() section for any run of consecutive empty buckets.

That holds up on small maps, but it falls apart at scale. On a 144-CPU arm64 host running a CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE kernel, periodic BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH calls against an LRU hash map with 16,777,216 buckets held a CPU inside the batch op for 77+ seconds and triggered the soft lockup watchdog.

Commit 75134f16e7dd ("bpf: Add schedule points in batch ops") fixed this same problem in the generic batch ops, but not in this htab-native path, which every htab-based hash map variant uses for its lookup[_and_delete] batch ops.

Complete that fix here. Leave the critical section after 64 consecutive empty buckets, call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), and resume at the saved bucket cursor. No locks are held at that point, and resuming from the cursor is already the function's behavior for non-empty buckets. Add the same call to the per-bucket loop after copy_to_user(), where every lock has been dropped. cond_resched_rcu() is not enough here: sleeping with bpf_prog_active elevated makes trac…

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CVE-2026-98644 — bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch()