CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-89741
7.8 HIGH
Official page ↗
- Status
- Received
- Published
- 2026-09-11
- Last modified
- 2026-10-19
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 (416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67)
- 7.8 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
Revert "media: v4l2-dev: fix error handling in __video_register_device()"
This reverts commit 2a934fdb01db6458288fc9386d3d8ceba6dd551a.
The intentions of that patch were good, but it doesn't work.
The idea is that if device_register fails, you have to do a put_device
to let the ref counter release resources.
However, the V4L2 API says that if video_register_device() fails, then
you have to call video_device_release(), which kfree()s the video_device
struct.
But the put_device() will already have freed the struct, so you end
up in a double-free scenario.
There is not really a good way of fixing this without breaking
video_register_device() into two parts, one that initializes everything,
and one that does the actual device_register, and then converting all
V4L2 drivers to this new model.
That is a massive job, and it is very unlikely that device_register
will fail.
So rather than ending up in a double-free scenario, just revert this
patch, and in that case we'll have a small memory leak. Which is a lot
more robust.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2ac009a65d2385e9f0799eaf9d9694a29153a161 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3de14b4f681a1b3c6d375d98d9d37a55ebb85349 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/712ca1cf756de2557a116e0df55791bac0c9f99e git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8027f82c0f5474ed72448e160ee9778051fa1f49 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8b998c171ed875e402e1fd1c5cd619e4ca05e9c1 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/aad08b5f67d2a8116e1a00bce2611c1513b10bce git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ce792b94e03882108019ba996c1a7c4d4e09be2c git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e7600f5cee5de14065f950807931d6e6d40fb2d7 git.kernel.org