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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.7

CVE-2024-38613 json

m68k: Fix spinlock race in kernel thread creation

published 2024-06-19 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2024-37476

cvss
4.7
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 7%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

m68k: Fix spinlock race in kernel thread creation

Context switching does take care to retain the correct lock owner across the switch from 'prev' to 'next' tasks. This does rely on interrupts remaining disabled for the entire duration of the switch.

This condition is guaranteed for normal process creation and context switching between already running processes, because both 'prev' and 'next' already have interrupts disabled in their saved copies of the status register.

The situation is different for newly created kernel threads. The status register is set to PS_S in copy_thread(), which does leave the IPL at 0. Upon restoring the 'next' thread's status register in switch_to() aka resume(), interrupts then become enabled prematurely. resume() then returns via ret_from_kernel_thread() and schedule_tail() where run queue lock is released (see finish_task_switch() and finish_lock_switch()).

A timer interrupt calling scheduler_tick() before the lock is released in finish_task_switch() will find the lock already taken, with the current task as lock owner. This causes a spinlock recursion warning as reported by Guenter Roeck.

As far as I can ascertain, this race has been opened in commit 533e6903bea0 ("m68k: split ret_from_fork(), simplify kernel_thread()") but I haven't done a detailed study of kernel history so it may well predate that commit.

Interrupts cannot be disabled in the saved status register copy for kernel threads (init will complain about interrupts disabled when finally starting user space). Disable interrupts temporarily when switching the tasks' register sets in resume().

Note that a simple oriw 0x700,%sr after restoring sr is not enough here - this leaves enough of a race for the 'spinlock recursion' warning to still be observed.

Tested on ARAnyM and qemu (Quadra 800 emulation).

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 4.19.316, 5.4.278, 5.10.219, 5.15.161, 6.1.93, 6.6.33, 6.8.12, 6.9.3, 6.10
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.94-1
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.8.12-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2024-38613

  • linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-192.212
  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-121.131
  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-40.40
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1130.140
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1069.75
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1013.14
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1134.143
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1068.76

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2024-38613

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2024-38613 updated cvss 4.4

kernel: m68k: Fix spinlock race in kernel thread creation

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.18% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 7% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 4.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.