Vulnerability Details CVE-2026-43401
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
cpufreq: intel_pstate: Fix NULL pointer dereference in update_cpu_qos_request()
The update_cpu_qos_request() function attempts to initialize the 'freq'
variable by dereferencing 'cpudata' before verifying if the 'policy'
is valid.
This issue occurs on systems booted with the "nosmt" parameter, where
all_cpu_data[cpu] is NULL for the SMT sibling threads. As a result,
any call to update_qos_requests() will result in a NULL pointer
dereference as the code will attempt to access pstate.turbo_freq using
the NULL cpudata pointer.
Also, pstate.turbo_freq may be updated by intel_pstate_get_hwp_cap()
after initializing the 'freq' variable, so it is better to defer the
'freq' until intel_pstate_get_hwp_cap() has been called.
Fix this by deferring the 'freq' assignment until after the policy and
driver_data have been validated.
[ rjw: Added one paragraph to the changelog ]
Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score
EPSS Score 0.0
EPSS Ranking 2.2%
CVSS Severity
CVSS v3 Score 5.5
Products affected by CVE-2026-43401
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.1
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.10
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.11
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.13
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.14
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.16
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.17
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.18
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.2
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.3
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.4
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.5
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.6
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.7
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.8
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.18.9
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19.1
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19.3
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19.4
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19.6
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19.7
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.19.8
-
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:7.0