CVE-2026-43401

Updated on 08 May 2026

Severity

5.5 Medium severity

Details

CVSS score
5.5
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

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

cpufreq: intel_pstate: Fix NULL pointer dereference in update_cpu_qos_request()

The update_cpu_qos_request() function attempts to initialize the ‘freq’ variable by dereferencing ‘cpudata’ before verifying if the ‘policy’ is valid.

This issue occurs on systems booted with the “nosmt” parameter, where all_cpu_data[cpu] is NULL for the SMT sibling threads. As a result, any call to update_qos_requests() will result in a NULL pointer dereference as the code will attempt to access pstate.turbo_freq using the NULL cpudata pointer.

Also, pstate.turbo_freq may be updated by intel_pstate_get_hwp_cap() after initializing the ‘freq’ variable, so it is better to defer the ‘freq’ until intel_pstate_get_hwp_cap() has been called.

Fix this by deferring the ‘freq’ assignment until after the policy and driver_data have been validated.

[ rjw: Added one paragraph to the changelog ]

Details

Affected product:
AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , TuxCare 9.6 ESU
Affected packages:
kernel @ 5.14.0 (+1 more)

Fixes