CVE-2026-89796

Status: UPDATED  |  Advisory ID: CVE-2026-89796

Key Details

Affected Products, Subsystems & Sectors

What to Know

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

mm/damon/core: avoid infinite kdamond_merge_regions() internal loop

Patch series "mm/damon: unurgent fixes for infinite loop, NULL de-ref and

races", v1.1.

Sashiko found a few issues in DAMON that could cause infinite loop, NULL

dereference and monitoring results degradation. The first two sounds

scary but the infinite loop happens only under unreasonable user setup.

The NULL dereference is only in a unit test. Monitoring results

degradation is trivial since it is only best-effort, and those happens

from only unlikely races. Still those are bugs that better to fix if

possible. Fix those.

This patch (of 6):

Due to online parameter update like events, the number of DAMON regions

could be higher than the user-set upper limit. kdamond_merge_regions()

repeats merge regions until the number meets the limit, while doubling the

merge threshold up to the theoretical maximum threshold. It is tried only

up to the theoretical maximum threshold because even the aggressive

merging can fail from reducing the number of regions under the

user-defined upper limit. For example, there could be many user-defined

non-contiguous regions that cannot be merged.

The threshold based loop break condition is evaluated by comparing the

threshold for the next merging try against the theoretical maximum

threshold. If max_thres is larger than UINT_MAX / 2, doubling the

threshold could make it overflow, and bypass the loop break condition. In

the case, if the number of regions cannot be reduced under the upper limit

like explained above, the loop will run infinitely.

Prevent the case by doing the break condition check before doubling the

threshold. Also, prevent the threshold exceeding the maximum threshold,

as it could overflow and apply the wrong merge threshold.

This issue is unlikely to occur in real world, since having the max_thres

higher than UINT_MAX / 2 require unrealistically large aggregation

intervals compared to the sampling interval. Also, it requires an

unrealistically large number of uncontiguous regions setup. Nonetheless,

the consequence is bad and the fix is simple.

The issue was discovered [1] by Sashiko. (NVD)

What to Do

Monitor Linux's web page for any future patch releases.

References