CVE-2026-89871

About vulnerability

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

media: video-i2c: fix kthread error pointer left in kthread_vid_cap on failure

kthread_run() returns an ERR_PTR on failure, not NULL. When start_streaming() fails, data->kthread_vid_cap is left holding this error pointer instead of being cleared.

This causes two subsequent bugs:

1. A future call to start_streaming() sees a non-NULL kthread_vid_cap and returns 0 (success) immediately, without actually starting the capture thread.
2. A call to stop_streaming() checks ‘kthread_vid_cap == NULL’ which is false for an error pointer, and proceeds to call kthread_stop() on the error pointer, leading to a kernel crash.

Fix this by resetting kthread_vid_cap to NULL on failure before jumping to the error path.

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 , Debian 11 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , TuxCare 9.8 ESU , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

linux @ 5.4.0 (+10 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.