What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-97904: cpufreq: initialize policy rwsem before sysfs publication

• 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: 2026-09-25 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: cpufreq: initialize policy rwsem before sysfs publication cpufreq_policy_alloc() initializes policy->rwsem after kobject_init_and_add() has created the policy sysfs directory and its default attributes. A sysfs access can therefore reach a policy callback before the semaphore has been initialized. Initialize policy->rwsem before publishing the policy kobject so sysfs callbacks always see an initialized semaphore.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 4.2 — 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/27c9b491bf7604e83b50c3bbfa18a30266ff345f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2cee937f779f69b195b37bbec1e888da9bfe9d58
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3e5d1bf4bd687beb2cb4e32a07af695455925588
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/82a54923700da5de83ce2b26c0b43f6b5005c8f1
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b14987a0f73777644099f47f01aba3b0f9dc6c27
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b22193eea2ce32c39dda5e09f9c2be2f3fd7eb4a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c9d8435814f2ac533c40fe3f35d94235bc3a9443
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/dc11263cb05ed519758fd135fe08d611bad1f241

Get alerted when CVE-2026-97904 or the next vulnerability affects your stack