CVE-2026-93241
Low risk· EPSS 13%Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk13th percentile - higher than 13% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's memory cgroup (memcg) mechanism causes OOM-killed processes to get stuck in the exit path for hours. The issue occurs when the oom_reaper fails to free the process memory (setting MMF_OOM_SKIP), and dying threads still attempt to swap in pages from zswap, leading to serialization on oom_lock and severe exit delays.
Risk Assessment
Organizations may face prolonged application outages where OOM-killed processes do not terminate, holding system resources and requiring manual intervention. In extreme cases, processes can hang for many hours, causing service unavailability.
Recommendation
Apply the Linux kernel patch that bypasses reclaim and the OOM killer for dying tasks once the oom_reaper is done. Update the kernel to a version containing this fix and monitor systems for similar symptoms.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
See all- CVE-2026-99259Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the soc/tegra: pmc driver has an uninitialised early_pmc->rate variable for legacy 32-bit Tegra devices. The variable is never configured and remains 0, triggering a warning in tegra_pmc_enter_suspend_mode(). The issue appeared after the PMC driver was changed to create the PMC context dynamically, updating rate only in the new context.
- CVE-2026-99258Unknown
In the Linux kernel, hv_apicid_to_vp_index() uses per-CPU hypercall input and output pages. In an SEV-SNP CoCo VM without a paravisor the output page is not allocated, so the hypervisor stores the resulting VP index into memory not allocated by the guest. The fix uses the input page for both input and output.
- CVE-2026-99257Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the shared GPIO mechanism based on platform lookup tables requires an associated struct device. An fwnode-based lookup with no associated device currently causes a NULL-pointer dereference. The fix adds a check that lets the kernel gracefully handle this situation with an error.
- CVE-2026-99256Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the dm cache module used a rw_semaphore for background_work_lock, although write locks on rw_semaphores have strict owner semantics. The locking process was not always the same as the unlocking one, triggering a warning with CONFIG_DEBUG_RWSEMS during suspend/resume of a cache device. The fix replaces the rw_semaphore with a spinlock and a wait queue.
- CVE-2026-99251Unknown
In the Linux kernel, init_vp_index() contains a retry loop that strips CPUs from a node if they are already in the allocated cpumask or outside the HK_TYPE_MANAGED_IRQ housekeeping cpumask. If the housekeeping cpumask contains no CPU in that node, the loop becomes infinite. The fix skips NUMA nodes with no housekeeping CPU and aborts early when no online housekeeping CPUs exist.
- CVE-2026-99250Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the NBCON console printing kthreads are started very early during boot via early_initcall(). Asynchronously enabling/disabling interrupts during early boot may interfere with early SMP setup on some hardware platforms, causing hangs. The fix postpones kthread startup until after all arch initcalls have completed.
- CVE-2026-99249Unknown
In the Linux kernel, zap_pid_ns_processes() waiting for PID namespace cleanup was not freezable. A tracer outside the namespace that does not reap its traced zombies keeps PIDs allocated, making the wait unbounded and causing every suspend attempt to fail. The fix makes the wait loops use TASK_FREEZABLE states so the freezer can freeze waiting tasks.
- CVE-2026-99248Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the i2c: xiic driver was changed to restore non-managed runtime PM instead of the devres-based approach to fix a clk WARN flood. The managed release tore down runtime PM in the wrong order, causing the clock to be disabled twice and triggering "clkN already disabled" warnings on every teardown.
- CVE-2026-99247Unknown
In the Linux kernel, if trace buffer allocation fails during early boot, tracing_disabled remains set and the global trace array events list stays uninitialized. tracer_init_tracefs_work_func() runs asynchronously without checking this state and calls event_trace_init() and init_tracer_tracefs(), leading to a NULL pointer dereference Oops during boot. The fix checks tracing_disabled at the start of the work function.
- CVE-2026-99215Unknown
In the Linux kernel power supply subsystem, a use-after-free vulnerability exists. If a power supply is unregistered while its external_power_changed() callback is still running, the driver may free data that the callback is still accessing, leading to a kernel crash (NULL pointer dereference).
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: memcg: bypass the reclaim and oom killer for dying tasks once oom_reaper is done At Meta, we are seeing instances where an OOM killed job is stuck in the exit path for several hours. In one particular case, the job was stuck for more than 8 hours and I had to manually remove the memory.max limits to allow the process to exit. The job was a single process job and had ~55 GiB memory.max and zswap enabled. It had almost 0 anon in memory and ~111 GiB in zswap compressed to ~51 GiB zswap pool (i.e. almost all of memory.current was zswap). Nothing was left on the LRUs to reclaim. On further inspection, I observed ~20k threads of that process stuck with the following stack: [<0>] mem_cgroup_out_of_memory+0x4e/0xa0 [<0>] charge_memcg+0x8bf/0x990 [<0>] mem_cgroup_swapin_charge_folio+0x4e/0x80 [<0>] __read_swap_cache_async+0x10c/0x260 [<0>] swapin_readahead+0x116/0x3f0 [<0>] do_swap_page+0x13c/0x1ce0 [<0>] handle_mm_fault+0x61d/0x11f0 [<0>] do_user_addr_fault+0x3e7/0x6d0 [<0>] exc_page_fault+0x8f/0x110 [<0>] asm_exc_page_fault+0x22/0x30 [<0>] __get_user_8+0x14/0x20 [<0>] futex_cleanup+0x27/0x1c0 [<0>] futex_exit_release+0x47/0x60 [<0>] do_exit+0x107/0x940 [<0>] do_group_exit+0x81/0xa0 [<0>] get_signal+0x2b1/0x6e0 [<0>] arch_do_signal_or_restart+0x1a/0x1c0 [<0>] exit_to_user_mode_loop+0xa8/0x1c0 [<0>] do_syscall_64+0x152/0x250 [<0>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53 In addition the dmesg was filled with "Out of memory and no killable processes..." messages. I have no idea why oom reaper was not able to reap/unmap the process. My guess is that since oom reaper tries to acquire mmap_lock in read mode limited number of times and then gives up, there might be a thread of that process which had mmap_lock in write mode at that time. My initial suspicion was the futex_cleanup and kernel page fault causing infinite fault and charge retries but that was put to rest in previous discussions happened on similar problem [1]. My current theory is that it is just a simple slow serialization behind the oom_lock. Unlike page allocator, memcg charge code takes the oom_lock without the "try". Though memcg oom code uses mutex_lock_killable(), note that in the call stack get_signal() consumes SIGKILL (or sigdelset(SIGKILL)) before calling do_group_exit(). So this mutex_lock_killable() is just a mutex_lock() here. Therefore 10s of thousands of threads are waiting on oom_lock and one by one they get -EFAULT from get_user() in the futex cleanup code and bails out. Discussion from [1] led to commit a75ffa26122b ("memcg, oom: do not bypass oom killer for dying tasks") which routes dying tasks into the OOM path precisely so the oom_reaper can reap their mm and free the memory asynchronously. But the reaper is best-effort and one-shot: if it cannot take mmap_lock for read (e.g. a sibling thread holds it for write) it sets MMF_OOM_SKIP and never retries, leaving only the glacial oom_lock-serialized synchronous drain. Once MMF_OOM_SKIP is set there is no more asynchronous reclaim coming for the mm, so a dying task charging against it has nothing left to wait for: it frees its memory only once it finishes exiting. Running reclaim and the (no-victim) OOM killer for it is then pointless, and doing it for 10s of thousands of exiting threads is what serializes them behind oom_lock. So before reclaim, if current is an OOM victim whose reaper is done, fail the charge. Reproduced with 20k threads, each parking a robust futex head on its own zswapped page, OOM-group-killed while a sibling holds mmap_lock for write so the reaper gives up and sets MMF_OOM_SKIP. Tested on next-20260728 and baseline show ~90 seconds exit time while with the patch the exit time reduced to ~3 seconds.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

