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io_uring: wake ring pollers for local task_work

Written by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5 from the sources below. Verify against them.

—Not rated
Exploited
No known exploitation
Fix
No fix listed
Who is exposed
Not reported
25Pcve.now Index 25 of 100 · methodology v3 · provisional
  • 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-2026-99268 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.

Published
Last modified
Published
Not listed in CISA KEV
25/100 · provisional
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

The Linux kernel's io_uring subsystem is affected when applications use the IORING_SETUP_DEFER_TASKRUN mode and wait on the ring file descriptor with poll() or epoll. Because pending completions were not waking those waiters, such a program could sleep indefinitely and miss events that were ready to be processed.

Read the original description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: io_uring: wake ring pollers for local task_work With IORING_SETUP_DEFER_TASKRUN completions are queued as local work, and only become CQEs when the submitter enters the kernel to wait for events. For an application that finds out via poll() or epoll on the ring fd when it is time to do that, io_uring_poll() reports EPOLLIN if local work is pending. That only helps if the work is there at the time of the call. When DEFER_TASKRUN was added, io_req_local_work_add() did io_cqring_wake(), which took care of tasks sleeping in poll() as well. Then polling got a wait queue of its own, ->poll_wq, and the wake up in io_req_local_work_add() was replaced by waking the submitter directly. Since then ->poll_wq is only woken when CQEs are committed, which for such a ring is done by the very task that is waiting to be told to: submitter completion poll(ring_fd) io_uring_poll() // nothing yet schedule() io_req_local_work_add() // ->cq_wait_nr: nobody waits // sleeps on Wake ->poll_wq when the first entry is put on the work list. Like for the eventfd, that must not be done right away if the work is queued from a wake up handler, as the chain of wake ups could get back to the wait queue whose lock is held. Use an RCU callback in that case, with a reference to the ring.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. First seen by cve.now
  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • Linux Linux

    Version range not reported

  • Linux Linux

    6.3

Evidence 5

  1. Link
  2. Link
  3. Link
  4. Link
  5. Link

Corrections

None so far.

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FAQ

Questions about CVE-2026-99268

Is CVE-2026-99268 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-2026-99268?

Linux: version 6.3.Source: cve.now feed data