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 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 versions
Linux kernel versions
5.8
and later are affected. Fixed in
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-rc1
and their respective stable series.
References
9 totalFrequently asked questions
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What is CVE-2026-80916?
CVE-2026-80916 is a unscored severity Linux kernel vulnerability . It affects Linux kernel versions from 5.8 onward and has been patched in 5.10.269, 5.15.220, 6.1.185 and others. CVE-2026-80916 has not been confirmed as actively exploited and is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
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Is there a patch available for CVE-2026-80916?
Yes. CVE-2026-80916 has been patched. Fixed versions include 5.10.269, 5.15.220, 6.1.185 and others. If you are running Linux kernel 5.8 or later up to the fix versions, apply the relevant patch for your kernel branch.
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Is CVE-2026-80916 actively exploited?
No. CVE-2026-80916 has not been confirmed as actively exploited. It is not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.