published May 8, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
sched/mmcid: Handle vfork()/CLONE_VM correctly
Matthieu and Jiri reported stalls where a task endlessly loops in
mm_get_cid() when scheduling in.
It turned out that the logic which handles vfork()'ed tasks is broken. It
is invoked when the number of tasks associated to a process is smaller than
the number of MMCID users. It then walks the task list to find the
vfork()'ed task, but accounts all the already processed tasks as well.
If that double processing brings the number of to be handled tasks to 0,
the walk stops and the vfork()'ed task's CID is not fixed up. As a
consequence a subsequent schedule in fails to acquire a (transitional) CID
and the machine stalls.
Cure this by removing the accounting condition and make the fixup always
walk the full task list if it could not find the exact number of users in
the process' thread list.