CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-89796

Low risk· EPSS 11%
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.20%

11th percentile - higher than 11% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's DAMON module can cause an infinite loop in kdamond_merge_regions(). The issue stems from integer overflow when doubling the merge threshold if the maximum threshold exceeds UINT_MAX/2. The loop break condition is checked after doubling, which can bypass the safeguard under specific conditions and hang the system.

Risk Assessment

The vulnerability may cause the kdamond process to hang, potentially affecting system stability. In practice, it requires unrealistic configuration (very large aggregation intervals and many non-contiguous regions), but the consequences are severe.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit addressing the vulnerability). If not possible, avoid DAMON configurations with extremely large aggregation intervals.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

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Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/damon/core: avoid infinite kdamond_merge_regions() internal loop Patch series "mm/damon: unurgent fixes for infinite loop, NULL de-ref and races", v1.1. Sashiko found a few issues in DAMON that could cause infinite loop, NULL dereference and monitoring results degradation. The first two sounds scary but the infinite loop happens only under unreasonable user setup. The NULL dereference is only in a unit test. Monitoring results degradation is trivial since it is only best-effort, and those happens from only unlikely races. Still those are bugs that better to fix if possible. Fix those. This patch (of 6): Due to online parameter update like events, the number of DAMON regions could be higher than the user-set upper limit. kdamond_merge_regions() repeats merge regions until the number meets the limit, while doubling the merge threshold up to the theoretical maximum threshold. It is tried only up to the theoretical maximum threshold because even the aggressive merging can fail from reducing the number of regions under the user-defined upper limit. For example, there could be many user-defined non-contiguous regions that cannot be merged. The threshold based loop break condition is evaluated by comparing the threshold for the next merging try against the theoretical maximum threshold. If max_thres is larger than UINT_MAX / 2, doubling the threshold could make it overflow, and bypass the loop break condition. In the case, if the number of regions cannot be reduced under the upper limit like explained above, the loop will run infinitely. Prevent the case by doing the break condition check before doubling the threshold. Also, prevent the threshold exceeding the maximum threshold, as it could overflow and apply the wrong merge threshold. This issue is unlikely to occur in real world, since having the max_thres higher than UINT_MAX / 2 require unrealistically large aggregation intervals compared to the sampling interval. Also, it requires an unrealistically large number of uncontiguous regions setup. Nonetheless, the consequence is bad and the fix is simple. The issue was discovered [1] by Sashiko.

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