Critical · published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: x86: Cancel delayed I/O APIC EOI handling before destroying vCPUs
Cancel (and flush) the I/O APIC's delayed EOI handling work during the
"pre VM destroy" phase, before vCPUs are destroyed, as processing the EOI
broadcast will inject another IRQ if the line is asserted, i.e. will try
to deliver an IRQ to the target vCPU(s). Canceling the work after vCPUs
are destroyed leads to UAF if the delayed work is processed after vCPUs are
destroyed.
BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in __kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic_fast+0x9bf/0xa20 arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c:1250
Read of size 8 at addr ffff8880499abea0 by task kworker/1:2/1218
CPU: 1 UID: 0 PID: 1218 Comm: kworker/1:2 Not tainted 7.1.0-rc7 #5 PREEMPT(lazy)
Hardware name: QEMU Ubuntu 25.10 PC v2 (i440FX + PIIX, + 10.1 machine, 1996), BIOS 1.16.3-debian-1.16.3-2 04/01/2014
Workqueue: events kvm_ioapic_eoi_inject_work
Call Trace:
<TASK>
__dump_stack lib/dump_stack.c:94
dump_stack_lvl+0x100/0x190 lib/dump_stack.c:120
print_address_description mm/kasan/report.c:378
print_report+0x139/0x4ad mm/kasan/report.c:482
kasan_report+0xe4/0x1d0 mm/kasan/report.c:595
__kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic_fast+0x9bf/0xa20 arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c:1250
__kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic+0xd8/0xbf0 arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c:1345
kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic arch/x86/kvm/lapic.h:129
ioapic_service+0x308/0x590 arch/x86/kvm/ioapic.c:492
kvm_ioapic_eoi_inject_work+0x13c/0x190 arch/x86/kvm/ioapic.c:532
process_one_work+0xa59/0x19a0 kernel/workqueue.c:3314
process_scheduled_works kernel/workqueue.c:3397
worker_thread+0x5eb/0xe50 kernel/workqueue.c:3478
kthread+0x370/0x450 kernel/kthread.c:436
ret_from_fork+0x72b/0xd30 arch/x86/kernel/process.c:158
ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30 arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S:245
</TASK>
Note, the VM is unreachable once kvm_destroy_vm() starts, and scheduling
new work via kvm_ioapic_send_eoi() can only be done via KVM_RUN, i.e.
requires a live vCPU.
Alternatively, KVM could simply destroy the I/O APIC during the "pre" phase
of VM destruction, but that gets more than a bit sketchy as KVM expects the
I/O APIC to exist if ioapic_in_kernel() is true, and nested virtualization
in particular has a bad habit of touching VM-scope state during vCPU
destruction. E.g. attempting to free the PIC during the pre phase would
lead to a NULL pointer dereference in kvm_cpu_has_extint(), and it's not
hard to imagine the I/O APIC having a similar flaw.