PT-2026-64678 · Linux · Linux

CVE-2026-64457

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Published

2026-07-25

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Updated

2026-07-25

None

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In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
virtio pci: fix vq info pointer lookup via wrong index
Unbinding a virtio balloon device:
echo virtio0 > /sys/bus/virtio/drivers/virtio balloon/unbind
triggers a NULL pointer dereference. The dmesg says:
BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000008 [...] RIP: 0010: list del entry valid or report+0x5/0xf0 Call Trace: vp del vqs+0x121/0x230 remove common+0x135/0x150 virtballoon remove+0xee/0x100 virtio dev remove+0x3b/0x80 device release driver internal+0x187/0x2c0 unbind store+0xb9/0xe0 kernfs fop write iter.llvm.11660790530567441834+0xf6/0x180 vfs write+0x2a9/0x3b0 ksys write+0x5c/0xd0 do syscall 64+0x54/0x230 entry SYSCALL 64 after hwframe+0x29/0x31 [...]
The virtio balloon device registers 5 queues (inflate, deflate, stats, free page, reporting) but only the first two are unconditional. The stats, free page and reporting queues are each conditional on their respective feature bits. When any of these features are absent, the corresponding vqs info entry has name == NULL, creating holes in the array.
The root cause is an indexing mismatch introduced when vq info storage was changed to be passed as an argument. vp find vqs msix() and vp find vqs intx() store the info pointer at vp dev->vqs[i], where 'i' is the caller's sparse array index. However, the virtqueue itself gets vq->index assigned from queue idx, a dense index that skips NULL entries. When holes exist, 'i' and queue idx diverge. Later, vp del vqs() looks up info via vp dev->vqs[vq->index] using the dense index into the sparsely-populated array, and hits NULL.
Fix this by storing info at vp dev->vqs[queue idx] instead of vp dev->vqs[i], so the store index matches the lookup index (vq->index). Apply the fix to both the MSIX and INTX paths.
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Related Identifiers

CVE-2026-64457

Affected Products

Linux