CVE-2026-98831

About vulnerability

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

of/overlay: don’t leak fragment references when changeset init fails

init_overlay_changeset() stores the number of initialized fragments in ovcs->count only on full success. When find_target() or the symbols lookup fails partway through, the target and overlay references taken for the fragments initialized so far are never dropped: free_overlay_changeset() bounds its cleanup loop by ovcs->count, which is still 0.

Store the running count on the error path so free_overlay_changeset() puts whatever was set up. The store is guarded by ovcs->fragments because on the allocation-failure path cnt still holds the counting pass total while there is no fragments array; everywhere else cnt only counts fully-initialized fragments.

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 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

linux @ 5.10.259 (+12 more)