CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-45942 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: fix e4b bitmap inconsistency reports A bitmap inconsistency issue was observed during stress tests under mixed huge-page workloads. Ext4 reported multiple e4b bitmap check failures like: ext4_mb_complex_scan_group:2508: group 350, 8179 free clusters as per group info. But got 8192 blocks Analysis and experimentation confirmed that the issue is caused by a race condition between page migration and bitmap modification. Although this timing window is extremely narrow, it is still hit in practice: folio_lock ext4_mb_load_buddy __migrate_folio check ref count folio_mc_copy __filemap_get_folio folio_try_get(folio) ...... mb_mark_used ext4_mb_unload_buddy __folio_migrate_mapping folio_ref_freeze folio_unlock The root cause of this issue is that the fast path of load_buddy only increments the folio's reference count, which is insufficient to prevent concurrent folio migration. We observed that the folio migration process acquires the folio lock. Therefore, we can determine whether to take the fast path in load_buddy by checking the lock status. If the folio is locked, we opt for the slow path (which acquires the loc…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2026-05-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Showing 1 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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