CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-68250

HighCVSS 8.2
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.27%

19th percentile - higher than 19% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the blocker tracking mechanism assumed lock pointers are at least 4-byte aligned to use their lower bits for type encoding. On architectures like m68k that only guarantee 2-byte alignment for 32-bit values, this assumption is broken, causing WARN_ON_ONCE warnings. The fix adjusts runtime checks to silently ignore locks that are not 4-byte aligned, disabling the feature in such cases.

Risk Assessment

The organization may experience false warnings and potential system instability on architectures with weaker alignment, complicating diagnostics and leading to unexpected kernel behavior.

Recommendation

It is recommended to update the Linux kernel to a version containing this fix to avoid warnings and potential issues on architectures like m68k.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: hung_task: fix warnings caused by unaligned lock pointers The blocker tracking mechanism assumes that lock pointers are at least 4-byte aligned to use their lower bits for type encoding. However, as reported by Eero Tamminen, some architectures like m68k only guarantee 2-byte alignment of 32-bit values. This breaks the assumption and causes two related WARN_ON_ONCE checks to trigger. To fix this, the runtime checks are adjusted to silently ignore any lock that is not 4-byte aligned, effectively disabling the feature in such cases and avoiding the related warnings. Thanks to Geert Uytterhoeven for bisecting!

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS