What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-89749: tracing: Fix crash passing ERR_PTR to kthread_stop()

• Severity: unknown
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-11 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: tracing: Fix crash passing ERR_PTR to kthread_stop() event_test_stuff() calls kthread_run() and unconditionally passes the returned task_struct pointer to kthread_stop(). kthread_run() returns an error pointer such as ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM) when kthread creation fails, for example under memory pressure during the boot-time event self-test. kthread_stop() then dereferences the invalid pointer, crashing the kernel. Check the result of kthread_run() before passing it to kthread_stop(). Use WARN_ON() so that a failure to create the self-test thread does not go unnoticed, matching the ring-buffer self-test fix in commit 91542863abad ("ring-buffer: Fix crash passing ERR_PTR to kthread_stop()").

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 2.6.31 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/12a499f741fc5be3731c8b0a0d909406575cc2eb
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/42ccb215ef0a552acbbd32f81009bfe4b278ba77
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/649bc7df3e5d7be6f7996a95084037dbf3cad1e5
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/98d06fb9865a490e12ebe32d65b9ffac6108614d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/adadf4192f700bca82abfda9fa6d58c0bf37cc04
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c1a4fb7aa290f158d50654d640292e49d9055fd1
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c40e0b4fa365969e67011529eabdfb66d1022256
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ceb1707aef5824cf024eb82d10787b7621e2ff35

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