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CVE-2026-80916 json

kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT

published 2026-09-09 1 mo ago modified 2026-10-19 20 d ago also EUVD-2026-75091

cvss
—
not scored
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:

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.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.10.269, 5.15.220, 6.1.185, 6.6.154, 6.12.106, 6.18.47, 7.1.11, 7.2.1, 7.3
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.187-1
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.107-1
  • linux Debian 14 7.1.12-1
  • linux-6.12 Debian 12 6.12.107-1~deb12u1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-80916

  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-202.212
  • linux Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1119.126
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.17
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1120.130
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.18
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1115.121
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1113.117

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-80916

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

  • kernel-source openSUSE Tumbleweed 7.2.5-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:11773-1

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-2026-80916 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT

  • 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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-8, openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9
    +1 more products
    Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9
    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

Exploit prediction

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

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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