Files
linux/kernel
Tetsuo Handa 2eed77fdcb kcov: fix data corruption and race conditions on PREEMPT_RT
syzbot is reporting KCOV state corruption on PREEMPT_RT kernels, for the
temporary storage used for saving/restoring remote KCOV state is currently
allocated as the per-CPU area.

On PREEMPT_RT kernels, softirq handlers run as preemptible task threads
(e.g., ksoftirqd). If a softirq context preempts a task running a remote
KCOV session, it safely saves the task's state into the per-CPU area.
However, if that softirq thread is subsequently preempted by a higher-
priority softirq thread on the same CPU, the second softirq will overwrite
the same per-CPU area, permanently destroying the original task's KCOV
state.

Fix this data corruption by moving the temporary storage from the per-CPU
area to the per-thread area. Since each softirq thread now owns its own
task context, nested softirq preemption no longer causes data overwrites.

Note that while the temporary storage is now on a per-thread basis, the
per-CPU kcov_percpu_data.lock must be retained, for we need to ensure that
kcov_remote_start() and kcov_remote_stop() operate atomically without
racing against asynchronous interrupts that manipulate the current task's
KCOV state.

It is likely that GFP_KERNEL allocation by vmalloc_node() in kcov_init()
has already called panic() before returning NULL, for there will be no
OOM-killable userspace processes when __init function of built-in module
runs. But this patch also fixes crashing the kernel when vmalloc_node()
in kcov_init() returned NULL, for kcov_init() left per-CPU irq_area == NULL
but kcov_remote_start() depends on per-CPU irq_area != NULL, resulting in

  (1) doing vmalloc() in kcov_remote_start() despite !in_task() context

  (2) out-of-array-bounds access if (1) succeeded but
      kcov->remote_size < CONFIG_KCOV_IRQ_AREA_SIZE

  (3) always leak memory allocated by (1), eventually killing all
      OOM-killable userspace processes

problems.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/43552d09-2ce2-4b19-b0d3-a2d1ab952145@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp
Reported-by: syzbot+3f51ad7ac3ae57a6fdcc@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Closes: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=3f51ad7ac3ae57a6fdcc
Reported-by: syzbot+47cf95ca1f9dcca872c8@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Closes: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=47cf95ca1f9dcca872c8
Reported-by: syzbot+8a173e13208949931dc7@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Closes: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=8a173e13208949931dc7
Reported-by: syzbot+90984d3713722683112e@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Closes: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=90984d3713722683112e
Analyzed-by: AI Mode in Google Search (no mail address)
Fixes: 5ff3b30ab5 ("kcov: collect coverage from interrupts")
Signed-off-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Reviewed-by: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Cc: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@gmail.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Clark Williams <williams@redhat.com>
Cc: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Cc: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
2026-08-05 11:20:13 -07:00
..
2026-06-02 15:36:06 +02:00
2025-10-29 10:29:54 +01:00
2026-01-26 19:07:13 -08:00