CVE-2025-39737
Published: Sep 11, 2025
Modified: May 12, 2026
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/kmemleak: avoid soft lockup in __kmemleak_do_cleanup() A soft lockup warning was observed on a relative small system x86-64 system with 16 GB of memory when running a debug kernel with kmemleak enabled. watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#8 stuck for 33s! [kworker/8:1:134] The test system was running a workload with hot unplug happening in parallel. Then kemleak decided to disable itself due to its inability to allocate more kmemleak objects. The debug kernel has its CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_MEM_POOL_SIZE set to 40,000. The soft lockup happened in kmemleak_do_cleanup() when the existing kmemleak objects were being removed and deleted one-by-one in a loop via a workqueue. In this particular case, there are at least 40,000 objects that need to be processed and given the slowness of a debug kernel and the fact that a raw_spinlock has to be acquired and released in __delete_object(), it could take a while to properly handle all these objects. As kmemleak has been disabled in this case, the object removal and deletion process can be further optimized as locking isn't really needed. However, it is probably not worth the effort to optimize for such an edge case that should rarely happen. So the simple solution is to call cond_resched() at periodic interval in the iteration loop to avoid soft lockup.
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
Linux | Linux | affected 2abd839aa7e615f2bbc50c8ba7deb9e40d186768 - < 9f1f4e95031f84867c5821540466d62f88dab8caaffected 2abd839aa7e615f2bbc50c8ba7deb9e40d186768 - < 1ef72a7fedc5bca70e8cc980985790de10d407aaaffected 2abd839aa7e615f2bbc50c8ba7deb9e40d186768 - < a04de4c40aab9b338dfa989cf4aec70fd187eeb2affected 2abd839aa7e615f2bbc50c8ba7deb9e40d186768 - < f014c10d190b92aad366e56b445daffcd1c075e4affected 2abd839aa7e615f2bbc50c8ba7deb9e40d186768 - < e21a3ddd58733ce31afcb1e5dc3cb80a4b5bc29b+4 more versions |
Linux | Linux | affected 5.4unaffected 0 - < 5.4unaffected 5.4.297 - <= 5.4.*unaffected 5.10.241 - <= 5.10.*unaffected 5.15.190 - <= 5.15.*+6 more versions |
References
Security Training
Train your team to recognize and prevent security threats with our comprehensive security awareness program.
Start TrainingVulnerability Scanning
Discover vulnerabilities in your applications and infrastructure before attackers do.
Scan Now