CVE-2025-68250: hung_task: fix warnings caused by unaligned lock pointers

Severity: high (CVSS 8.2 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2025-12-16 · updated 2026-10-14

Description

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!

Affected products

Linux kernel: 6.16 — fixed in 6.18

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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