Subject: [PATCH AUTOSEL 6.18] xfrm: Wait for RCU readers during policy netns exit

From: Sasha Levin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:17:57 -0400

From: Steffen Klassert <[email-masked]>

[ Upstream commit 069daad4f2ae9c5c108131995529d5f02392c446 ]

xfrm_policy_fini() frees the policy_bydst hash tables after flushing the
policy work items and deleting all policies, but it does not wait for
concurrent RCU readers to leave their read-side critical sections first.

The policy_bydst tables are published via rcu_assign_pointer() and are
looked up through rcu_dereference_check(), so netns teardown must also
wait for an RCU grace period before freeing the table memory.

Fix this by adding synchronize_rcu() before freeing the policy hash tables.

Fixes: e1e551bc5630 ("xfrm: policy: prepare policy_bydst hash for rcu lookups")
Signed-off-by: Steffen Klassert <[email-masked]>
Reviewed-by: Florian Westphal <[email-masked]>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <[email-masked]>
---

LLM Generated explanations, may be completely bogus:

Error: Failed to generate final synthesis

 net/xfrm/xfrm_policy.c | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/net/xfrm/xfrm_policy.c b/net/xfrm/xfrm_policy.c
index c32d34c441ee0..4526c9078b136 100644
--- a/net/xfrm/xfrm_policy.c
+++ b/net/xfrm/xfrm_policy.c
@@ -4290,6 +4290,8 @@ static void xfrm_policy_fini(struct net *net)
 #endif
 	xfrm_policy_flush(net, XFRM_POLICY_TYPE_MAIN, false);
 
+	synchronize_rcu();
+
 	WARN_ON(!list_empty(&net->xfrm.policy_all));
 
 	for (dir = 0; dir < XFRM_POLICY_MAX; dir++) {
-- 
2.53.0