Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2026-89986

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/mempolicy: fix sleeping allocation in alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave() syzbot reported a sleeping function called from invalid context splat in bucket_table_alloc(). When rhashtable_insert_slow() rehashes the table under rcu_read_lock(), it calls bucket_table_alloc(..., GFP_ATOMIC | __GFP_NOWARN). If the bucket table allocation uses vmalloc, __vmalloc_node_range_noprof() invokes vm_area_alloc_pages() -> alloc_pages_bulk_mempolicy_noprof() with the passed GFP_ATOMIC flags. If the current task has an MPOL_WEIGHTED_INTERLEAVE mempolicy, alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave() is called and currently hardcodes GFP_KERNEL when allocating the temporary weights array, triggering a might_alloc() splat in atomic/RCU contexts. Pass the gfp flags (masked with GFP_RECLAIM_MASK to strip page-allocator zone modifiers like __GFP_HIGHMEM) received by alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave() to kmalloc() instead of hardcoding GFP_KERNEL. Since the weights buffer is immediately initialized in full, kmalloc() is sufficient.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.8 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (5.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 6th percentile — 5.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-89986: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: -0.000

Affected products

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-89986?
CVE-2026-89986 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2026-09-16.
How severe is CVE-2026-89986?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.