Bug 2531065 (CVE-2026-80916) - CVE-2026-80916 kernel: kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT
Summary: CVE-2026-80916 kernel: kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEM...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2026-80916
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-09-09 16:39 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-10-20 10:50 UTC (History)
17 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-09 16:39:37 UTC
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.


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