Commit c1fa0bb633e4 for kernel
commit c1fa0bb633e4a6b11e83ffc57fa5abe8ebb87891
Author: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Date: Mon May 11 08:55:11 2026 -0700
exit: prevent preemption of oopsing TASK_DEAD task
When an already-exiting task oopses, make_task_dead() currently calls
do_task_dead() with preemption enabled. That is forbidden:
do_task_dead() calls __schedule(), which has a comment saying "WARNING:
must be called with preemption disabled!".
If an oopsing task is preempted in do_task_dead(), between becoming
TASK_DEAD and entering the scheduler explicitly, bad things happen:
finish_task_switch() assumes that once the scheduler has switched away
from a TASK_DEAD task, the task can never run again and its stack is no
longer needed; but that assumption apparently doesn't hold if the dead
task was preempted (the SM_PREEMPT case).
This means that the scheduler ends up repeatedly dropping references on
the dead task's stack, which can lead to use-after-free or double-free
of the entire task stack; in other words, two tasks can end up running
on the same stack, resulting in various kinds of memory corruption.
(This does not just affect "recursively oopsing" tasks; it is enough to
oops once during task exit, for example in a file_operations::release
handler)
Fixes: 7f80a2fd7db9 ("exit: Stop poorly open coding do_task_dead in make_task_dead")
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/kernel/exit.c b/kernel/exit.c
index 25e9cb6de7e7..9a909993ab1d 100644
--- a/kernel/exit.c
+++ b/kernel/exit.c
@@ -1073,6 +1073,7 @@ void __noreturn make_task_dead(int signr)
futex_exit_recursive(tsk);
tsk->exit_state = EXIT_DEAD;
refcount_inc(&tsk->rcu_users);
+ preempt_disable();
do_task_dead();
}