Critical · published July 19, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
gcov: use atomic counter updates to fix concurrent access crashes
GCC's GCOV instrumentation can merge global branch counters with loop
induction variables as an optimization. In inflate_fast(), the inner copy
loops get transformed so that the GCOV counter value is loaded multiple
times to compute the loop base address, start index, and end bound. Since
GCOV counters are global (not per-CPU), concurrent execution on different
CPUs causes the counter to change between loads, producing inconsistent
values and out-of-bounds memory writes.
The crash manifests during IPComp (IP Payload Compression) processing when
inflate_fast() runs concurrently on multiple CPUs:
BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: ffffd0a3c0902ffa
RIP: inflate_fast+1431
Call Trace:
zlib_inflate
__deflate_decompress
crypto_comp_decompress
ipcomp_decompress [xfrm_ipcomp]
ipcomp_input [xfrm_ipcomp]
xfrm_input
At the crash point, the compiler generated three loads from the same
global GCOV counter (__gcov0.inflate_fast+216) to compute base, start, and
end for an indexed loop. Another CPU modified the counter between loads,
making the values inconsistent - the write went 3.4 MB past a 65 KB
buffer.
Add -fprofile-update=prefer-atomic to CFLAGS_GCOV at the global level in
the top-level Makefile, guarded by a try-run compile test. The test
compiles a minimal program with and without -fprofile-update=prefer-atomic
using the full KBUILD_CFLAGS, then compares undefined symbols in the
resulting object files. If prefer-atomic introduces new undefined
references (such as __atomic_fetch_add_8 on i386 or __aarch64_ldadd8_relax
on arm64 with outline-atomics), the flag is not added -- the kernel does
not link against libatomic.
On architectures where GCC inlines 64-bit atomic counter updates (x86_64,
s390, ...) the test passes and the flag is enabled, preventing the
compiler from merging counters with loop induction variables and fixing
the observed concurrent-access crash.
On architectures where the flag would introduce libatomic dependencies, it
is silently omitted and behaviour is no worse than before this patch.
Move the CFLAGS_GCOV block from its original position (before the arch
Makefile include) to after the core KBUILD_CFLAGS assignments but before
the scripts/Makefile.gcc-plugins include. This placement ensures the
try-run test sees arch-specific flags (-m32, -march=,
-mno-outline-atomics) while avoiding GCC plugin flags (-fplugin=) that
would break the test on clean builds when plugin shared objects do not yet
exist.