CVE-2026-89803
7.8 HIGHPublished 2026-09-16 · Updated 2026-09-16
AI risk analysis
- Summary
- This vulnerability in the Linux kernel's Nouveau driver allows an attacker to cause a use-after-free condition by delivering a kill event during the channel teardown process, potentially leading to a denial of service or other kernel crashes.
- Exploitability
- Exploitation requires precise timing and knowledge of the driver's internal state. It is highly technical and would likely only be feasible for advanced attackers with deep knowledge of the Nouveau driver and Linux kernel.
- Blast radius
- If exploited, this could lead to a denial of service for the affected system, potentially impacting services running on the affected GPU or the entire system.
- Detection
- No reliable host or network indicator is derivable from the published description.
- Prioritized remediation
- Upgrade to the fixed version 5.10.144 or later.
Analysis generated locally by qwen2.5:7b-instruct (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.
NVD description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/nouveau: unsubscribe the channel-kill event before the fence context nouveau_channel_del() tears the fence context down first and only drops the channel-kill subscription later, in the middle of the nvif object teardown: if (chan->fence) nouveau_fence(chan->cli->drm)->context_del(chan); ... nvif_object_dtor(&chan->vram); nvif_event_dtor(&chan->kill); The subscribed handler is nouveau_channel_killed(), which calls nouveau_channel_kill() and from there nouveau_fence_context_kill() on chan->fence. A kill event delivered in that window takes fctx->lock and walks fctx->pending on a fence context that context_del() has already freed. Nothing reaches this below Fermi today, because the subscription is gated on FERMI_CHANNEL_GPFIFO and nothing kills a channel there. On Fermi and newer the window is real but narrow, since a kill has to land exactly while the channel is being destroyed. That is reason enough on its own, which is why this carries a Fixes: tag. The last patch in this series subscribes Tesla channels as well; nothing kills those today, so it does not widen the exposure now, but it is the groundwork for a recovery path that would, and the ordering is better fixed before that lands than alongside it. Drop the subscription before anything it depends on is torn down.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
References
Data: NVD (public domain). Analysis: local $0 model. Defensive use only.