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CVE-2026-99065 json

cgroup/cpuset: Handle cpu hotplug race in guarantee_active_cpus()

published 19d ago modified 19d ago also EUVD-2026-108731

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 5%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

cgroup/cpuset: Handle cpu hotplug race in guarantee_active_cpus()

With commit 2125c0034c5d ("cgroup/cpuset: Make cpuset hotplug processing synchronous"), the cpuset hotplug operation becomes synchronous. That commit also removes the code that handles race between cpuset_hotplug_work and cpu hotplug notifier with the assumption that race is now gone. Later commit 7a0aabd9ce69 ("cgroup/cpuset: Always use cpu_active_mask") updates the cpuset code to always use cpu_active_mask instead of cpu_online_mask in some places including guarantee_online_cpus() which is renamed to guarantee_active_cpus() in that commit.

In the case of CPU offline operation, cpu_active_mask is updated first in sched_cpu_deactivate() to remove the offline CPU before cpuset_handle_hotplug() is called to update the effective_cpus of the affected cpusets. The cpu_online_mask is updated after that near the end of the offline operation to remove the offline CPU. As a result, the race comes back and the top cpuset may not have any active CPU leading to NULL pointer dereference during the race window when guarantee_active_cpus() is called after cpu_active_mask is updated to remove the CPU to be torn down but before cpuset_handle_hotplug() is able to properly update the effective_cpus of the top cpuset.

Fix this by adding back the NULL cs check to avoid this problem.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 7.3
  • linux Debian 14 7.2.11-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-99065

  • linux Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-10.10
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-1004.4
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-1004.4
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-1004.4
  • linux-riscv Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-10.10.1
  • linux-oracle Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-1004.4
  • linux-realtime Ubuntu 26.10 7.3.0-10.10.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-99065

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-99065 updated cvss 4.1

kernel: cgroup/cpuset: Handle cpu hotplug race in guarantee_active_cpus()

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +82 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 kernel-rt, kernel-rt-selftests-internal Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-8
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.17% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 5% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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