Bug 2482634 (CVE-2026-46173) - CVE-2026-46173 kernel: exit: prevent preemption of oopsing TASK_DEAD task
Summary: CVE-2026-46173 kernel: exit: prevent preemption of oopsing TASK_DEAD task
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2026-46173
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-05-28 11:06 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-05-28 15:00 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-05-28 11:06:53 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

exit: prevent preemption of oopsing TASK_DEAD task

When an already-exiting task oopses, make_task_dead() currently calls
do_task_dead() with preemption enabled.  That is forbidden:
do_task_dead() calls __schedule(), which has a comment saying "WARNING:
must be called with preemption disabled!".

If an oopsing task is preempted in do_task_dead(), between becoming
TASK_DEAD and entering the scheduler explicitly, bad things happen:
finish_task_switch() assumes that once the scheduler has switched away
from a TASK_DEAD task, the task can never run again and its stack is no
longer needed; but that assumption apparently doesn't hold if the dead
task was preempted (the SM_PREEMPT case).

This means that the scheduler ends up repeatedly dropping references on
the dead task's stack, which can lead to use-after-free or double-free
of the entire task stack; in other words, two tasks can end up running
on the same stack, resulting in various kinds of memory corruption.

(This does not just affect "recursively oopsing" tasks; it is enough to
oops once during task exit, for example in a file_operations::release
handler)


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