Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's Data Access Monitoring (DAMON) component could cause the system to hang or become unresponsive. This occurs due to a technical 'race condition' where certain internal monitoring tasks fail to coordinate properly during shutdown, leading to a deadlock. While this primarily affects system stability rather than data security, it can result in a denial of service for affected operations.
Technical details
A race condition exists in mm/damon/core.c within the Linux kernel's DAMON subsystem. The vulnerability occurs because damos_walk() request registration and the unsetting of damon_ctx->kdamond are protected by different mutexes. If damos_walk() is called while the kdamond thread is terminating but before the kdamond pointer is cleared, the caller may register a new request and enter an infinite wait state (deadlock) because the terminating thread will never process the new request. This has been resolved by introducing a 'walk_control_obsolete' flag protected by the walk_control_lock to ensure atomic state checks during registration.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 6.14.x and earlier
Timeline
- 2026-03-27: patched: Initial patch authored by SeongJae Park
- 2026-05-27: advisory: NVD published the CVE record