Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98826
Go to dashboardWhen the ac100 RTC driver fails to probe after registering its clocks, the clock provider stays registered and points at memory that has already been freed. A later clock lookup for that device tree node can read freed memory, which can crash the kernel or be used for further memory corruption.
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.
Only systems running a Linux kernel with the rtc-ac100 driver, which is used on Allwinner ARM boards such as sun8i-a83t and sun9i-a80 device trees. The sources do not state which kernel versions are fixed. The window is narrow: the bug only matters when the RTC device registration fails after the clocks were registered, which the sources say can only happen on an out-of-memory error.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
Each 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:
rtc: ac100: Fix clock provider use-after-free on probe failure
ac100_rtc_register_clks() registers the RTC-32k clock with clk_hw_register_fixed_rate() and the clock provider with of_clk_add_hw_provider(). Neither is device managed, and both are released only from ac100_rtc_remove(). The driver core does not call remove() when probe() fails: really_probe() reaches probe_failed below the device_remove() call and goes straight to releasing the device's managed resources.
ac100_rtc_probe() ends with
return devm_rtc_register_device(chip->rtc);
so if that fails after the clocks have been registered, the provider is left on the global of_clk_providers list holding chip->clk_data, which was allocated with devm_kzalloc() and is freed while probe() unwinds. A later lookup on this device tree node then reads freed memory in of_clk_hw_onecell_get(). Consumers that do exactly that exist in tree: the wifi power sequence nodes on sun8i-a83t-bananapi-m3 and sun8i-a83t-cubietruck-plus take <&ac100_rtc 1>, and the sun9i-a80 boards route osc32k through <&ac100_rtc 0>. The window is narrow, as devm_rtc_register_device() can only fail with -ENOMEM here, but the provider is left dangling whenever it does.
The RTC-32k clock is leaked on the same path. Since clk_core_lookup() searches a global list that is not scoped per device, __clk_register() rejects the duplicate name with -EEXIST, so the leak also makes a later probe of the same device fail.
The error path that returns -EINVAL when the ADDA 4M parent clock cannot be found leaks the RTC-32k clock in the same way. No provider has been registered at that point, so that one is a leak rather than a use-after-free.
Register both with devm_clk_hw_register_fixed_rate() and devm_of_clk_add_hw_provider() so that they are released whenever the device goes away, on a failed probe as well as on unbind. Devres releases in reverse order of acquisition, so the provider is removed before chip->clk_data is freed, and the clkout children are now unregistered before their parent rather than after it. ac100_rtc_unregister_clks() and the remove callback then have nothing left to do and are removed.
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