Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98521
Go to dashboardIn the Linux i915 graphics driver, the busy ioctl can loop forever when a GEM object is destroyed while the ioctl is iterating its fences. The sources describe a denial-of-service style hang on the kernel side, not code execution.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Systems running a Linux kernel with the i915 Intel graphics driver, typically desktops, workstations and laptops with Intel integrated graphics. Systems without i915 hardware or with the module not loaded are not exposed; the sources do not say how an unprivileged user reaches the ioctl.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the fixed stable kernel releases listed in the upstream commit 5113479556025093bf8133bb2dcaa33be2d50921lsmod | grep i915Each row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
drm/i915: fix incorrect RCU teardown order
i915_gem_busy_ioctl uses dma_resv_for_each_fence_unlocked() to iterate over the fences in an GEM object without holding a reference but only the RCU read side lock.
What can happen here is that the GEM object is destroyed concurrently while i915_gem_busy_ioctl is still running. This won't free the GEM objects memory, but still drops all the dma_fence references.
Now when dma_resv_for_each_fence_unlocked() sees a destroyed dma_fence it assumes that a new fence list was installed and re-starts the loop.
But in the case of a destroyed GEM object a new fence list is never installed, only the old one freed and therefore the iteration never finishes resulting in an endless loop.
The solution is to drop the fence references only after the RCU grace period.
The fixes tag is not necessary the patch introducing the problem, but the one making it so worse that we need to address it.
This problem was pointed out by Sashiko-bot.
(cherry picked from commit 5113479556025093bf8133bb2dcaa33be2d50921)
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