Bug 2531065 (CVE-2026-80916)
| Summary: | CVE-2026-80916 kernel: kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT | ||
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| Product: | [Other] Security Response | Reporter: | OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport> |
| Component: | vulnerability | Assignee: | Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot> |
| Status: | NEW --- | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | unspecified | CC: | akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers |
| Target Milestone: | --- | Keywords: | Security |
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | --- | |
| Doc Text: |
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's kcov component. A race condition occurs in PREEMPT_RT kernels when softirq handlers, running as preemptible task threads, are preempted by higher-priority softirq threads on the same CPU. This can lead to data corruption of the KCOV state, kernel crashes, and memory leaks. The most significant consequence is a potential denial of service (DoS) due to system instability and resource exhaustion.
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Story Points: | --- |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | Type: | --- | |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT syzbot is reporting KCOV state corruption on PREEMPT_RT kernels, for the temporary storage used for saving/restoring remote KCOV state is currently allocated as the per-CPU area. On PREEMPT_RT kernels, softirq handlers run as preemptible task threads (e.g., ksoftirqd). If a softirq context preempts a task running a remote KCOV session, it safely saves the task's state into the per-CPU area. However, if that softirq thread is subsequently preempted by a higher- priority softirq thread on the same CPU, the second softirq will overwrite the same per-CPU area, permanently destroying the original task's KCOV state. Fix this data corruption by moving the temporary storage from the per-CPU area to the per-thread area. Since each softirq thread now owns its own task context, nested softirq preemption no longer causes data overwrites. Note that while the temporary storage is now on a per-thread basis, the per-CPU kcov_percpu_data.lock must be retained, for we need to ensure that kcov_remote_start() and kcov_remote_stop() operate atomically without racing against asynchronous interrupts that manipulate the current task's KCOV state. It is likely that GFP_KERNEL allocation by vmalloc_node() in kcov_init() has already called panic() before returning NULL, for there will be no OOM-killable userspace processes when __init function of built-in module runs. But this patch also fixes crashing the kernel when vmalloc_node() in kcov_init() returned NULL, for kcov_init() left per-CPU irq_area == NULL but kcov_remote_start() depends on per-CPU irq_area != NULL, resulting in (1) doing vmalloc() in kcov_remote_start() despite !in_task() context (2) out-of-array-bounds access if (1) succeeded but kcov->remote_size < CONFIG_KCOV_IRQ_AREA_SIZE (3) always leak memory allocated by (1), eventually killing all OOM-killable userspace processes problems.