CVE-2026-80916

kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT

N/A
Published: September 9, 2026 at 04:13 PM UTC
Updated: October 19, 2026 at 09:17 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorLinux Kernel

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Severity
N/A
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.2%

Description

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.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

5.85ff3b30ab57da82d8db4f14662a2858cabfbc2c0
Vendor states this is fixed in 18799e858b407bf355383c9dd6c06477aa437134 (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in 22670d1552fe155822b2abf91f920925f7d067b4 (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in 2eed77fdcb0cc48e8eccb2bcd4b7f2c6d650e84c (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in 5dc59fc959b2b5742985d7ef24bccd1868217dc2 (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in 8ed3ddf23d39bf5338406bd9f8863d44748cf6ce (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in a2fb8222cde23b0001812ed3acb7c0ea36dd94e2 (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in e11f5b48c82703242a3be7a7ae4b4940b4cb4610 (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in ef7048d8a614c5f5a9b20513a5428101a744514e (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in f8c9a3ec36b4ee3d4701b9be08f40e7bfbf89761 (fixed)
Vendor states this is fixed in 5.10.269 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 5.15.220 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 5.8 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 6.1.185 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 6.12.106 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 6.18.47 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 6.6.154 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 7.1.11 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 7.2.1 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 7.3 (unaffected)
Vendor states this is fixed in 7.3-rc1 (unaffected)

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet, and no fixed version or vendor advisory is recorded against it.

Quick Info

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