dm cache: fix issue with background work locking
Written by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5 from the sources below. Verify against them.
- Exploited
- No known exploitation
- Fix
- No fix listed
- Who is exposed
- Not reported
- Exploitation?/40Exploitation: unknown (data gap). No CISA SSVC exploitation rating yet
- Exposure?/25Exposure: unknown (data gap). No advisory context yet
- Reach20/20Affects Linux kernel (software on nearly every server, desktop or phone)
- Severity?/10Severity: unknown (data gap). No CVSS score or vendor rating
- No patch5/5No patch listed yet
What would change the score
- Would score about 80 if added to CISA KEV
- Would score about 75 if CISA's SSVC rates exploitation active
- Would score about 47 if advisories confirm default setups are exposed
CVE-2026-99256 is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. No public exploit code is tracked. It affects Linux; no fixed version is listed yet.
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- Published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- A 0-100 score for how much a CVE matters across the industry: exploitation, exposure, how widely the software is used, severity and whether a fix exists.What do these mean? →
- 25/100 · provisional
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
Summary
The Linux kernel's device-mapper cache target (dm-cache), used for block-level caching of storage devices, is affected. A locking flaw could let a process release a lock it did not acquire, which can trigger kernel warnings during operations such as suspending and resuming a cache device and may lead to instability in the affected system.
Read the original description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: dm cache: fix issue with background work locking dm cache used a rw_semaphore for background_work_lock. Write locks on rw_semaphores have strict owner semantics, but there was no guarantee that the process that locked background_work_lock was the same process that unlocked it. This can be easily seen using a kernel compiled with CONFIG_DEBUG_RWSEMS. Given a dm cache device <cache>, run: 'dmsetup suspend <cache> && dmsetup resume <cache>'. This will trigger a kernel warning: DEBUG_RWSEMS_WARN_ON((rwsem_owner(sem) != current) && !rwsem_test_oflags(sem, RWSEM_NONSPINNABLE)) triggered by cache_resume(). To fix this, switch from a rw_semaphore to a spinlock and a wait queue. dm cache already has a wait queue and associated counter, migration_wait and nr_allocated_migrations, that was getting woken up when background work was getting completed, but wasn't actually used by anything. This is replaced by the background_work queue and counter.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- Linux Linux
Version range not reported
- Linux Linux
4.12
Evidence 8
- Link
- Link
- Link
- Link
- Link
Corrections
None so far.
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Questions about CVE-2026-99256
Is CVE-2026-99256 being exploited?
It is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and CISA's SSVC assessment does not mark exploitation as active. That does not mean it has not been attacked: vendors and researchers can report attacks before CISA lists them. No public exploit code is tracked.Source: cve.now feed data
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-99256?
Linux: version 4.12.Source: cve.now feed data