CVE-2026-98622

About vulnerability

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

net/sched: act_ct: don’t WARN on benign flow_offload_alloc() failure

flow_offload_alloc() returns NULL when the conntrack entry is dying (e.g. raced with a conntrack flush) or when the GFP_ATOMIC allocation fails; both are expected under load and neither is a kernel bug. This path runs from softirq on every committed packet, so with panic_on_warn=1 an unprivileged user can panic the box just by racing a conntrack flush against a tc ... action ct commit classifier.

Reproduced with a custom repro under QEMU: a small, fixed set of UDP flows through tc filter ... action ct commit on lo, raced against threads flooding bare ctnetlink CT_DELETE (flush) requests. Hits WARNING: net/sched/act_ct.c:437 (tcf_ct_flow_table_add(), inlined into tcf_ct_act() in this build) within ~15s on the unpatched kernel; same setup is clean on the patched kernel. The fix itself is behavior-preserving: both branches already did goto err_alloc before and after, only the WARN is removed.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , Debian 11 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , TuxCare 9.8 ESU

Affected packages:

linux @ 5.10.259 (+4 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.