published September 4, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
io_uring/cmd: fix iovec leak when the async cmd is not recycled
An io_async_cmd carries an iovec array in ->vec.iovec, allocated when the
vec has to grow and kept across recycling through ctx->cmd_cache. On two
paths nothing frees it and io_clean_op()'s kfree(req->async_data) drops
the io_async_cmd without it.
io_req_uring_cleanup() clears the async data flags only when
io_alloc_cache_put() succeeds, and the cache holds IO_ALLOC_CACHE_MAX ==
128 entries, so once it is full the put fails and the vec is left behind.
An NVMe passthrough workload gets there without doing anything unusual:
nvme_uring_cmd_io() returns -EIOCBQUEUED, so the io_async_cmd stays
attached for the lifetime of the command and the live object count tracks
the queue depth. Above 128 the puts start failing.
->cleanup is the last chance to free an inherited vec, since
io_req_uring_cleanup() returns early for an io-wq issued command and is
not called at all for one completed without ever being issued. But
io_clean_op() calls ->cleanup only if REQ_F_NEED_CLEANUP is set, and for
uring_cmd that happens only where the vec has to grow, so a command
reusing a large enough cached vec never sets it. io_rw_alloc_async() and
io_msg_alloc_async() flag an inherited vec for exactly this reason;
io_uring_cmd_prep() does not.
Flag an inherited vec in io_uring_cmd_prep(), and free the vec when the
cache put fails, as io_req_rw_cleanup() does.
The leak is invisible under KASAN, where io_alloc_cache_vec_kasan() frees
the vec unconditionally.