CVE-2026-46173
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
exit: prevent preemption of oopsing TASK_DEAD task
When an already-exiting task oopses, make_task_dead() currently calls
do_task_dead() with preemption enabled. That is forbidden:
do_task_dead() calls __schedule(), which has a comment saying 'WARNING:
must be called with preemption disabled!'.
If an oopsing task is preempted in do_task_dead(), between becoming
TASK_DEAD and entering the scheduler explicitly, bad things happen:
finish_task_switch() assumes that once the scheduler has switched away
from a TASK_DEAD task, the task can never run again and its stack is no
longer needed; but that assumption apparently doesn't hold if the dead
task was preempted (the SM_PREEMPT case).
This means that the scheduler ends up repeatedly dropping references on
the dead task's stack, which can lead to use-after-free or double-free
of the entire task stack; in other words, two tasks can end up running
on the same stack, resulting in various kinds of memory corruption.
(This does not just affect 'recursively oopsing' tasks; it is enough to
oops once during task exit, for example in a file_operations::release
handler)