CVE-2026-53064

About vulnerability

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

dm cache: fix null-deref with concurrent writes in passthrough mode

In passthrough mode, when dm-cache starts to invalidate a cache entry and bio prison cell lock fails due to concurrent write to the same cached block, mg->cell remains NULL. The error path in invalidate_complete() attempts to unlock and free the cell unconditionally, causing a NULL pointer dereference:

KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x0000000000000000-0x0000000000000007] CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 134 Comm: fio Not tainted 6.19.0-rc7 #3 PREEMPT RIP: 0010:dm_cell_unlock_v2+0x3f/0x210 Call Trace: invalidate_complete+0xef/0x430 map_bio+0x130f/0x1a10 cache_map+0x320/0x6b0 __map_bio+0x458/0x510 dm_submit_bio+0x40e/0x16d0 __submit_bio+0x419/0x870

Reproduce steps:

1. Create a cache device

dmsetup create cmeta –table “0 8192 linear /dev/sdc 0” dmsetup create cdata –table “0 131072 linear /dev/sdc 8192” dmsetup create corig –table “0 262144 linear /dev/sdc 262144” dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/cmeta bs=4k count=1 oflag=direct dmsetup create cache –table “0 262144 cache /dev/mapper/cmeta
/dev/mapper/cdata /dev/mapper/corig 128 2 metadata2 writethrough smq 0”

2. Promote the first data block into cache

fio –filename=/dev/mapper/cache –name=populate –rw=write –bs=4k
–direct=1 –size=64k

3. Reload the cache into passthrough mode

dmsetup suspend cache dmsetup reload cache –table “0 262144 cache /dev/mapper/cmeta
/dev/mapper/cdata /dev/mapper/corig 128 2 metadata2 passthrough smq 0” dmsetup resume cache

4. Write to the first cached block concurrently

fio –filename=/dev/mapper/cache –name test –rw=randwrite –bs=4k
–randrepeat=0 –direct=1 –numjobs=2 –size 64k

Fix by checking if mg->cell is valid before attempting to unlock it.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

kernel-uek @ 5.4.17 (+11 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.