In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: workqueue: Improve scalability of workqueue watchdog touch On a ~2000 CPU powerpc system, hard lockups have been observed in the workqueue code when stop_machine runs (in this case due to CPU hotplug). This is due to lots of CPUs spinning in multi_cpu_stop, calling touch_nmi_watchdog() which ends up calling wq_watchdog_touch(). wq_watchdog_touch() writes to the global variable wq_watchdog_touched, and that can find itself in the same cacheline as other important workqueue data, which slows down operations to the point of lockups. In the case of the following abridged trace, worker_pool_idr was in the hot line, causing the lockups to always appear at idr_find. watchdog: CPU 1125 self-detected hard LOCKUP @ idr_find Call Trace: get_work_pool __queue_work call_timer_fn run_timer_softirq __do_softirq do_softirq_own_stack irq_exit timer_interrupt decrementer_common_virt * interrupt: 900 (timer) …