CVE-2026-72174

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. A local attacker could trigger a self-deadlock condition within the huge pages (hugetlb) memory management subsystem. This occurs when a specific memory scan operation attempts to acquire a write lock while the same process already holds a read lock, causing the affected thread to hang indefinitely. This vulnerability leads to a denial of service, making the system unresponsive.

This vulnerability is rated as Low impact because exploitation requires local user execution and the resulting deadlock is confined to the calling thread rather than triggering a full kernel panic or elevation of privileges. Triggering the condition necessitates issuing a specialized pagemap scanning ioctl across unallocated huge page memory regions, an operation uncommon in typical application workloads. Furthermore, the feature is not present in older enterprise baselines such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.