Findings

CVE-2026-74658

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: futex: Prevent robust futex exit race some more A robust futex unlock stores 0 over the whole futex…

Published Aug 22, 2026 · updated Oct 14, 2026

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: futex: Prevent robust futex exit race some more A robust futex unlock stores 0 over the whole futex value - wiping FUTEX_WAITERS - and wakes a single waiter. That wakeup is a one-shot notification: the protocol relies on its recipient to either acquire the futex (and eventually unlock while aware of the remaining contention) or re-arm FUTEX_WAITERS before sleeping again. If the woken waiter is killed before it can do either, the kernel must jump in and wake the next task down the line. This is a known complication of the futex protocol with a previous partial fix in commit ca16d5bee598 ("futex: Prevent robust futex exit race"). Unfortunately, that fix is insufficient. If a third task re-acquired the futex through the uncontended fast path in the meantime, the notification is lost: robust exit processing sees that it is owned by another task and does nothing, while the new owner sees no FUTEX_WAITERS when it unlocks and wakes nobody. The remaining waiters sleep forever behind a free futex: A owns the futex, B and C sleep in FUTEX_WAIT uval == A | FUTEX_WAITERS A robust unlock: store 0, FUTEX_WAKE(1) wakes B uval == 0 D fast path acquire: cmpxchg(0 -> D) uval == D, no FUTEX_WAITERS B killed before acting on the wakeup B exit walk, pending op: owner D != B -> no action D unlock: no FUTEX_WAITERS -> no wake C sleeps forever This is clearly a shortcoming in the implementation, which fails to keep the FUTEX_WAITERS bit consistent. Work around this by augmenting the robust list exit processing to also perform the extra wakeup if the futex word is owned by another thread but FUTEX_WAITERS is not set. This does not fix the problem of a non-contended take over/release and free sequence, which has been discussed for years and has been addressed by commit 3ca9595d9fb6 ("futex: Add support for unlocking robust futexes") and subsequent changes, but failed to take the problem described above into account. A more c