What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-89871: media: video-i2c: fix kthread error pointer left in kthread_vid_cap on failure

• 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: 2026-09-16 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: media: video-i2c: fix kthread error pointer left in kthread_vid_cap on failure kthread_run() returns an ERR_PTR on failure, not NULL. When start_streaming() fails, data->kthread_vid_cap is left holding this error pointer instead of being cleared. This causes two subsequent bugs: 1. A future call to start_streaming() sees a non-NULL kthread_vid_cap and returns 0 (success) immediately, without actually starting the capture thread. 2. A call to stop_streaming() checks 'kthread_vid_cap == NULL' which is false for an error pointer, and proceeds to call kthread_stop() on the error pointer, leading to a kernel crash. Fix this by resetting kthread_vid_cap to NULL on failure before jumping to the error path.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 4.18 — 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/0e7f2cd72a4f9268ee09a13b13f3339e7cc71557
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0fac63cac6689588da530764ccb6ba55ee8e4d8b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3d1b10d81fe54852ed953f4129577b733bbd6907
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/52fd9d80c0cea7bf09e7ee36cad316e5c39b7fe6
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5c35d380bea60503c4fe0986fe1de6a3263282b3
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/76e379754ba618989f6215be608d5c04774a611d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/968c5213e34c48d35febdfd09cf3dc58ad039140
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/db0f4531aa55cfb0171684ebfffe3ff04b79d5a8

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