CVE-2026-72178
Low risk· EPSS 10%Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk10th percentile - higher than 10% of all known CVEs
Summary
In the Linux kernel, a vulnerability was found in the DAMON subsystem where unsuccessfully committed target PIDs are not properly released, leading to a memory leak. The issue occurs when the commit operation fails after partially copying PIDs and the destination context lacks the appropriate cleanup callback.
Risk Assessment
The risk for the organization is a potential memory leak in systems using DAMON for memory monitoring, which could lead to performance degradation or system instability over time, especially with a large number of target regions.
Recommendation
It is recommended to immediately apply the official patch from the Linux kernel distributor that fixes the issue with double or missing PID release. Also, monitor security advisories and update the kernel to a version containing the fix.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
See all- CVE-2026-99259Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the soc/tegra: pmc driver has an uninitialised early_pmc->rate variable for legacy 32-bit Tegra devices. The variable is never configured and remains 0, triggering a warning in tegra_pmc_enter_suspend_mode(). The issue appeared after the PMC driver was changed to create the PMC context dynamically, updating rate only in the new context.
- CVE-2026-99258Unknown
In the Linux kernel, hv_apicid_to_vp_index() uses per-CPU hypercall input and output pages. In an SEV-SNP CoCo VM without a paravisor the output page is not allocated, so the hypervisor stores the resulting VP index into memory not allocated by the guest. The fix uses the input page for both input and output.
- CVE-2026-99257Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the shared GPIO mechanism based on platform lookup tables requires an associated struct device. An fwnode-based lookup with no associated device currently causes a NULL-pointer dereference. The fix adds a check that lets the kernel gracefully handle this situation with an error.
- CVE-2026-99256Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the dm cache module used a rw_semaphore for background_work_lock, although write locks on rw_semaphores have strict owner semantics. The locking process was not always the same as the unlocking one, triggering a warning with CONFIG_DEBUG_RWSEMS during suspend/resume of a cache device. The fix replaces the rw_semaphore with a spinlock and a wait queue.
- CVE-2026-99251Unknown
In the Linux kernel, init_vp_index() contains a retry loop that strips CPUs from a node if they are already in the allocated cpumask or outside the HK_TYPE_MANAGED_IRQ housekeeping cpumask. If the housekeeping cpumask contains no CPU in that node, the loop becomes infinite. The fix skips NUMA nodes with no housekeeping CPU and aborts early when no online housekeeping CPUs exist.
- CVE-2026-99250Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the NBCON console printing kthreads are started very early during boot via early_initcall(). Asynchronously enabling/disabling interrupts during early boot may interfere with early SMP setup on some hardware platforms, causing hangs. The fix postpones kthread startup until after all arch initcalls have completed.
- CVE-2026-99249Unknown
In the Linux kernel, zap_pid_ns_processes() waiting for PID namespace cleanup was not freezable. A tracer outside the namespace that does not reap its traced zombies keeps PIDs allocated, making the wait unbounded and causing every suspend attempt to fail. The fix makes the wait loops use TASK_FREEZABLE states so the freezer can freeze waiting tasks.
- CVE-2026-99248Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the i2c: xiic driver was changed to restore non-managed runtime PM instead of the devres-based approach to fix a clk WARN flood. The managed release tore down runtime PM in the wrong order, causing the clock to be disabled twice and triggering "clkN already disabled" warnings on every teardown.
- CVE-2026-99247Unknown
In the Linux kernel, if trace buffer allocation fails during early boot, tracing_disabled remains set and the global trace array events list stays uninitialized. tracer_init_tracefs_work_func() runs asynchronously without checking this state and calls event_trace_init() and init_tracer_tracefs(), leading to a NULL pointer dereference Oops during boot. The fix checks tracing_disabled at the start of the work function.
- CVE-2026-99215Unknown
In the Linux kernel power supply subsystem, a use-after-free vulnerability exists. If a power supply is unregistered while its external_power_changed() callback is still running, the driver may free data that the callback is still accessing, leading to a kernel crash (NULL pointer dereference).
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/damon/core: always put unsuccessfully committed target pids damon_commit_target() puts and gets the destination and the source target pids. It puts the destination target pid because it will be overwritten by the source target pid. It gets the source pid because the caller is supposed to eventually put the pids. In more detail, the caller will call damon_destroy_ctx() after damon_commit_ctx() to destroy the entire source context. And in this case, [f]vaddr operation set's cleanup_target() callback will put the pids. The commit operation is made at the context level. The operation can fail in multiple places including in the middle and after the targets commit operations. For any such failures, immediately the error is returned to the damon_commit_ctx() caller. If some or all of the source target pids were committed to the destination during the unsuccessful context commit attempt, those pids should be put twice. The source context will do the put operations using the above explained routine. However, let's suppose the destination context was not originally using [f]vaddr operation set and the commit failed before the ops of the source context is committed. The destination does not have the cleanup_target() ops callback, so it cannot put the pids via the damon_destroy_ctx(). As a result, the pids are leaked. The issue in the real world would be not very common. The commit feature is for changing parameters of running DAMON context while inheriting internal status like the monitoring results. The monitoring results of a physical address range ain't have things that are beneficial to be inherited to a virtual address ranges monitoring. So the problem-causing DAMON control would be not very common in the real world. That said, it is a supported feature. And damon_commit_target() failure due to memory allocation is relatively realistic [1] if there are a huge number of target regions. Fix by putting the pids in the commit operation in case of the failures. The issue was discovered [2] by Sashiko.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS