CVE-2026-23138 PUBLISHED

tracing: Add recursion protection in kernel stack trace recording

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 13.01.2026 Published: 14.02.2026 Updated: 14.02.2026

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

tracing: Add recursion protection in kernel stack trace recording

A bug was reported about an infinite recursion caused by tracing the rcu events with the kernel stack trace trigger enabled. The stack trace code called back into RCU which then called the stack trace again.

Expand the ftrace recursion protection to add a set of bits to protect events from recursion. Each bit represents the context that the event is in (normal, softirq, interrupt and NMI).

Have the stack trace code use the interrupt context to protect against recursion.

Note, the bug showed an issue in both the RCU code as well as the tracing stacktrace code. This only handles the tracing stack trace side of the bug. The RCU fix will be handled separately.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 5f5fa7ea89dc82d34ed458f4d7a8634e8e9eefce to 5b7f91acffd2c4c000971553d22efa1e1bb4feae (excl.)
  • affected from 5f5fa7ea89dc82d34ed458f4d7a8634e8e9eefce to 5f1ef0dfcb5b7f4a91a9b0e0ba533efd9f7e2cdb (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.8 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.8 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.6 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.19 to * (incl.)

References