In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfilter: conntrack: serialize hash resizes and cleanups Syzbot was able to trigger the following warning [1] No repro found by syzbot yet but I was able to trigger similar issue by having 2 scripts running in parallel, changing conntrack hash sizes, and: for j in `seq 1 1000` ; do unshare -n /bin/true >/dev/null ; done It would take more than 5 minutes for net_namespace structures to be cleaned up. This is because nf_ct_iterate_cleanup() has to restart everytime a resize happened. By adding a mutex, we can serialize hash resizes and cleanups and also make get_next_corpse() faster by skipping over empty buckets. Even without resizes in the picture, this patch considerably speeds up network namespace dismantles. [