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Medium 5.5Published Sep 11, 2025

CVE-2025-39737In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/kmemleak: avoid soft lockup in __kmemleak_do_cleanup() A soft lockup warning was observed on a relative small system x86-64 syst…

Updated under an hour ago ()

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It affects linux_kernel and 1 other product. Add what you run to find out whether that includes you.

No exploitation reported and no EPSS estimate yet.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/kmemleak: avoid soft lockup in __kmemleak_do_cleanup() A soft lockup warning was observed on a relative small system x86-64 system with 16 GB of memory when running a debug kernel with kmemleak enabled. watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#8 stuck for 33s! [kworker/8:1:134] The test system was running a workload with hot unplug happening in parallel. Then kemleak decided to disable itself due to its inability to allocate more kmemleak objects. The debug kernel has its CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_MEM_POOL_SIZE set to 40,000. The soft lockup happened in kmemleak_do_cleanup() when the existing kmemleak objects were being removed and deleted one-by-one in a loop via a workqueue. In this particular case, there are at least 40,000 objects that need to be processed and given the slowness of a debug kernel and the fact that a raw_spinlock has to be acquired and released in __delete_object(), it could take a while to properly handle all these objects. As kmemleak has been disabled in this case, the object removal and deletion process can be further optimized as locking isn't really needed. However, it is probably not worth the effort to optimize for such an edge case that should rarely happen. So the simple solution is to call cond_resched() at periodic interval in the iteration loop to avoid soft lockup.

CVSS
5.5 MEDIUM (v3.1, NVD)CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-401
Known exploited
Not in CISA's KEV catalog
EPSS (exploitation in the next 30 days)
Not loaded for this CVE
Assigned by
Not given
NVD analysis
Modified
Record last updated
Oct 19, 2026
First seen by InfoSec Signals
Oct 19, 2026

Affected products

Affected products
linux linux_kernel
linux:linux_kernel
from 5.4.1 before 5.4.297; from 5.5 before 5.10.241; from 5.11 before 5.15.190; from 5.16 before 6.1.149; from 6.2 before 6.6.103; from 6.7 before 6.12.43; from 6.13 before 6.15.11; from 6.16 before 6.16.2; and 7 more ranges
NVD
debian debian_linux
debian:debian_linux
11.0
NVD

References

  • patch
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  • mailing-list, third-party-advisory
  • mailing-list, third-party-advisory

The CVE record is authoritative. Products marked “from the name” were identified from the CNA's free-text names, not a CPE, and are matched less certainly. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.

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