Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

sched/rt: Fix race in push_rt_task

Overview
========
When a CPU chooses to call push_rt_task and picks a task to push to
another CPU's runqueue then it will call find_lock_lowest_rq method
which would take a double lock on both CPUs' runqueues. If one of the
locks aren't readily available, it may lead to dropping the current
runqueue lock and reacquiring both the locks at once. During this window
it is possible that the task is already migrated and is running on some
other CPU. These cases are already handled. However, if the task is
migrated and has already been executed and another CPU is now trying to
wake it up (ttwu) such that it is queued again on the runqeue
(on_rq is 1) and also if the task was run by the same CPU, then the
current checks will pass even though the task was migrated out and is no
longer in the pushable tasks list.

Crashes
=======
This bug resulted in quite a few flavors of crashes triggering kernel
panics with various crash signatures such as assert failures, page
faults, null pointer dereferences, and queue corruption errors all
coming from scheduler itself.

Some of the crashes:
-> kernel BUG at kernel/sched/rt.c:1616! BUG_ON(idx >= MAX_RT_PRIO)
Call Trace:
? __die_body+0x1a/0x60
? die+0x2a/0x50
? do_trap+0x85/0x100
? pick_next_task_rt+0x6e/0x1d0
? do_error_trap+0x64/0xa0
? pick_next_task_rt+0x6e/0x1d0
? exc_invalid_op+0x4c/0x60
? pick_next_task_rt+0x...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-38234

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.02% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 3.04% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-07-06 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-38234
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/07ecabfbca64f4f0b6071cf96e49d162fa9d138d
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/690e47d1403e90b7f2366f03b52ed3304194c793

Timeline