CVE-2026-68090

About vulnerability

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

debugobjects: Plug race against a concurrent OOM disable

syzbot reported a puzzling splat:

WARNING: kernel/time/hrtimer.c:443 at stub_timer+0xa/0x20

stub_timer() is installed as timer callback function in hrtimer_fixup_assert_init(), which is invoked when debug_object_assert_init() can’t find a shadow object. In that case debug objects emits a warning about it before invoking the fixup.

Though the provided console log lacks this warning and instead has the following a few seconds before the splat:

ODEBUG: Out of memory. ODEBUG disabled

So the object was looked up in debug_object_assert_init() and the lookup failed due a concurrent out of memory situation which disabled debug objects and freed the shadow objects:

debug_object_assert_init() if (!debug_objects_enabled) return; obj = alloc(); if (!obj) { // Out of memory debug_objects_enabled = false; free_objects(); obj = lookup_or_alloc();

// The lookup failed because the other side // removed the objects, so this returns // an error code as the object in question // is not statically initialized

if (!IS_ERR_OR_NULL(obj)) return; if (!obj) { debug_oom(); return; }

print(…) if (!debug_objects_enabled) return;

fixup(…)

The debug object splat is skipped because debug_objects_enabled is false, but the fixup callback is invoked unconditionally, which makes the timer disfunctional.

This is only a problem in debug_object_assert_init() and debug_object_activate() as both have to handle statically initialized objects and therefore must handle the error pointer return case gracefully. All other places only handle the found/not found case and the NULL pointer return is a signal for OOM. Otherwise they get a valid shadow object.

Plug the hole by checking whether debug objects are still enabled before invoking the print and fixup function in those two places.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , CentOS 7 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , RHEL 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU

Affected packages:

kernel @ 4.18.0 (+7 more)