CVE-2025-40210
kernel: Revert "NFSD: Remove the cap on number of operations per NFSv4 COMPOUND"
Severity
ModerateRed Hat Product Security
CVSS 3.1
Review impact separately from score.
Published · November 21, 2025
Updated · July 30, 2026
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
Revert "NFSD: Remove the cap on number of operations per NFSv4 COMPOUND"
I've found that pynfs COMP6 now leaves the connection or lease in a strange state, which causes CLOSE9 to hang indefinitely. I've dug into it a little, but I haven't been able to root-cause it yet. However, I bisected to commit 48aab1606fa8 ("NFSD: Remove the cap on number of operations per NFSv4 COMPOUND").
Tianshuo Han also reports a potential vulnerability when decoding an NFSv4 COMPOUND. An attacker can place an arbitrarily large op count in the COMPOUND header, which results in:
[ 51.410584] nfsd: vmalloc error: size 1209533382144, exceeds total pages, mode:0xdc0(GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_ZERO), nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0
when NFSD attempts to allocate the COMPOUND op array.
Let's restore the operation-per-COMPOUND limit, but increased to 200 for now.
Statement
The revert restores a limit on the number of NFSv4 COMPOUND operations to prevent unbounded memory allocation. Without this limit, a crafted request with a huge op count could trigger vmalloc overflow and could crash the kernel remotely.
CVSS score applicability
The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.
Mitigation
To mitigate this issue, prevent module nfsd from being loaded. Please see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278 for how to blacklist a kernel module to prevent it from loading automatically.
CVSS / CWE
CVSS 3.1 · 7.5CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CWE-770 · Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling