In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ceph: give up on paths longer than PATHMAX If the full path to be built by cephmdscbuildpath() happens to be longer than PATH_MAX, then this function will enter an endless (retry) loop, effectively blocking the whole task. Most of the machine becomes unusable, making this a very simple and effective DoS vulnerability. I cannot imagine why this retry was ever implemented, but it seems rather useless and harmful to me. Let's remove it and fail with ENAMETOOLONG instead.