published September 16, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
samples/damon/mtier: handle damon_stop() failure
damon_sample_mtier_stop() assumes its damon_stop() call will always
successfully stops the two DAMON contexts. Hence it deallocates the two
DAMON contexts after the damon_stop() call. However, if a given context
is already stopped, damon_stop() fails and returns an error while letting
the DAMON contexts that have not yet stopped keep running. This kind of
unexpected early DAMON context stops could happen due to memory allocation
failures in kdamond_fn(). Because damon_sample_mtier_stop() just
deallocates all DAMON contexts with damon_target and damon_region objects
that are linked to the contexts, the execution of the unstopped DAMON
context (kdamond) ends up using the memory that freed (use-after-free).
Fix the issue by separating the damon_stop() to be invoked per context.
Note that DAMON_SYSFS also allows multiple DAMON contexts execution. But,
it calls damon_stop() for each context one by one. Hence this issue is
only in mtier.
For the long term, it would be better to refactor damon_stop() to always
ensure stopping all contexts regardless of the failures in the middle.
Make this fix in the current way, though, to keep it simple and easy to
backport. I will do the refactoring later.
The issue was discovered [1] by Sashiko.