CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-43331
5.5 MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Status
- Modified
- Published
- 2026-05-08
- Last modified
- 2026-06-19
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 5.5 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
x86/kexec: Disable KCOV instrumentation after load_segments()
The load_segments() function changes segment registers, invalidating GS base
(which KCOV relies on for per-cpu data). When CONFIG_KCOV is enabled, any
subsequent instrumented C code call (e.g. native_gdt_invalidate()) begins
crashing the kernel in an endless loop.
To reproduce the problem, it's sufficient to do kexec on a KCOV-instrumented
kernel:
$ kexec -l /boot/otherKernel
$ kexec -e
The real-world context for this problem is enabling crash dump collection in
syzkaller. For this, the tool loads a panic kernel before fuzzing and then
calls makedumpfile after the panic. This workflow requires both CONFIG_KEXEC
and CONFIG_KCOV to be enabled simultaneously.
Adding safeguards directly to the KCOV fast-path (__sanitizer_cov_trace_pc())
is also undesirable as it would introduce an extra performance overhead.
Disabling instrumentation for the individual functions would be too fragile,
so disable KCOV instrumentation for the entire machine_kexec_64.c and
physaddr.c. If coverage-guided fuzzing ever needs these components in the
future, other approaches should be considered.
The problem is not relevant for 32 bit kernels as CONFIG_KCOV is not supported
there.
[ bp: Space out comment for better readability. ]
Affected configurations
• linux linux kernel (>= 6.6 < 6.18.22)
• linux linux kernel (>= 6.19 < 6.19.12)
• linux linux kernel 7.0
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0e96cd314c0d819c1635d68125a4d77852c2162e git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1e3e98596c2769721ade0418434852fb3af4849a Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/593d67032544b9271094fc9b43e437e017cb2b2f git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/917e3ad3321e75ca0223d5ccf26ceda116aa51e1 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/de05c66fab8847237a9ca216934e56d3ee837f08 Patch