CVE-2026-72314

CVE-2026-72314

High · published August 15, 2026

CVSS v3.1
7.8
EPSS
0%
Percentile
6.8
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

regulator: core: regulator_lock_two() should test for EDEADLK not EDEADLOCK

Compare against -EDEADLK, which is what ww_mutex_lock() actually

returns and what every other deadlock check in this file already uses.

Function regulator_lock_two() acquires two regulators via

regulator_lock_nested() -> ww_mutex_lock(). On contention,

ww_mutex_lock() returns -EDEADLK, which is the caller's signal to drop

the lock it holds and retry the acquisition in the canonical order.

However, regulator_lock_two() tests the return value against -EDEADLOCK

rather than -EDEADLK. On most architectures, EDEADLK and EDEADLOCK are

the same value, so the comparison happens to be correct and the bug is

invisible. But on MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC, those two errors have

different values. The test is wrong: a genuine -EDEADLK backoff no

longer matches -EDEADLOCK, so instead of unlocking and retrying, the

code falls into WARN_ON(ret) and returns with only one of the two

regulators locked.

In practice, this is a bug only on MIPS, because the regulator core is

not built or used on the other two platforms.

In general, EDEADLK is preferred over EDEADLOCK for new code.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
7.8 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00176 · 6.8th percentile
Published
2026-08-15T10:22Z
References (8)
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 15 AUG 05:55Z
    regulator: core: regulator_lock_two() should test for EDEADLK not EDEADLOCK
    cvelistv5