UNKNOWN NVD
CVE-2026-80916
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
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.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/18799e858b407bf355383c9dd6c06477aa437134
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/22670d1552fe155822b2abf91f920925f7d067b4
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2eed77fdcb0cc48e8eccb2bcd4b7f2c6d650e84c
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5dc59fc959b2b5742985d7ef24bccd1868217dc2
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8ed3ddf23d39bf5338406bd9f8863d44748cf6ce
This unknown severity vulnerability was published on 2026-09-09 via NVD.
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