CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-46290

MediumCVSS 5.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.12%

2th percentile - higher than 2% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel's handling of page faults during EFI runtime calls. A change in FPU code (d02198550423) causes kernel_fpu_begin() to disable softirqs via local_bh_disable(), setting SOFTIRQ_OFFSET in preempt_count. This makes efi_crash_gracefully_on_page_fault() incorrectly treat the context as an interrupt, leading to a panic() instead of graceful EFI_ABORTED recovery, resulting in a hard system freeze.

Risk Assessment

The organization risks an unrecoverable system freeze (kernel panic) when page faults occur during EFI runtime calls, e.g., on hardware with buggy firmware. This can disrupt critical services and cause system unavailability.

Recommendation

Apply the Linux kernel patch that replaces in_interrupt() with !in_task() in efi_crash_gracefully_on_page_fault(). Update to a kernel version containing this fix as soon as possible.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/efi: Fix graceful fault handling after FPU softirq changes Since commit d02198550423 ("x86/fpu: Improve crypto performance by making kernel-mode FPU reliably usable in softirqs"), kernel_fpu_begin() calls fpregs_lock() which uses local_bh_disable() instead of the previous preempt_disable(). This sets SOFTIRQ_OFFSET in preempt_count during the entire EFI runtime service call, causing in_interrupt() to return true in normal task context. The graceful page fault handler efi_crash_gracefully_on_page_fault() uses in_interrupt() to bail out for faults in real interrupt context. With SOFTIRQ_OFFSET now set, the handler always bails out, leaving EFI firmware page faults unhandled. This escalates to die() which also sees in_interrupt() as true and calls panic("Fatal exception in interrupt"), resulting in a hard system freeze. On systems with buggy firmware that triggers page faults during EFI runtime calls (e.g., accessing unmapped memory in GetTime()), this causes an unrecoverable hang instead of the expected graceful EFI_ABORTED recovery. Fix by replacing in_interrupt() with !in_task(). This preserves the original intent of bailing for interrupts or NMI faults, while no longer falsely triggering from the FPU code path's local_bh_disable(). [ardb: Sashiko spotted that using 'in_hardirq() || in_nmi()' leaves a window where a softirq may be taken before fpregs_lock() is called, but after efi_rts_work.efi_rts_id has been assigned, and any page faults occurring in that window will then be misidentified as having been caused by the firmware. Instead, use !in_task(), which incorporates in_serving_softirq(). ]

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