CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-98644

Low risk· EPSS 10%
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.21%

10th percentile - higher than 10% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability was fixed in the Linux kernel's __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() function for BPF hash maps. The function lacked a rescheduling point, so a single BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH call could walk the entire map without yielding the CPU, causing soft lockups and holding a CPU for over 77 seconds on large maps (e.g., 16 million buckets).

Risk Assessment

An attacker or a heavily loaded application can trigger BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH on a large hash map, causing CPU stalls, soft lockup watchdog triggers, and service unavailability on the affected host. This primarily affects systems running CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE kernels on arm64 and x86.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix for CVE-2026-98644. If immediate patching is not possible, restrict access to BPF batch operations on hash maps or reduce the size of LRU hash maps to limit processing time.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

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Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Avoid soft lockup in __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() __htab_map_lookup_and_delete_batch() has no rescheduling point. The batch count bounds how many entries are copied out, not how many buckets are visited, so one BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH call can walk the map end to end. The empty-bucket fast path is worse: it stays inside a single rcu_read_lock() / bpf_disable_instrumentation() section for any run of consecutive empty buckets. That holds up on small maps, but it falls apart at scale. On a 144-CPU arm64 host running a CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE kernel, periodic BPF_MAP_LOOKUP_BATCH calls against an LRU hash map with 16,777,216 buckets held a CPU inside the batch op for 77+ seconds and triggered the soft lockup watchdog. Commit 75134f16e7dd ("bpf: Add schedule points in batch ops") fixed this same problem in the generic batch ops, but not in this htab-native path, which every htab-based hash map variant uses for its lookup[_and_delete] batch ops. Complete that fix here. Leave the critical section after 64 consecutive empty buckets, call cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs(), and resume at the saved bucket cursor. No locks are held at that point, and resuming from the cursor is already the function's behavior for non-empty buckets. Add the same call to the per-bucket loop after copy_to_user(), where every lock has been dropped. cond_resched_rcu() is not enough here: sleeping with bpf_prog_active elevated makes tracing programs on that CPU silently skip their invocations. Plain cond_resched() is not enough either. It is a no-op under PREEMPT and PREEMPT_LAZY, the only models arm64 and x86 have offered since commit 7dadeaa6e851 ("sched: Further restrict the preemption modes"). It is also never a Tasks RCU quiescent state, in any model: the reschedule counts as a preemption. The walking task stays a holdout and stalls every synchronize_rcu_tasks() caller, ftrace and BPF trampoline teardown included, until the syscall returns [1]. cond_resched_tasks_rcu_qs() is the usual tool for that [2]. It reports the quiescent state at each yield and still reschedules as cond_resched() does on PREEMPT_NONE and PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY kernels.

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