CVE-2026-97409

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe-FC) driver. When establishing a connection to an NVMe-FC target, an administrative request timeout triggers error-handling routines that attempt to abort requests on uninitialized I/O queues. A malicious or unresponsive target could trigger this behavior during connection setup, leading to a kernel crash and a Denial of Service (DoS).

A moderate severity denial of service flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe-FC) driver. It affects the kernel and kernel-rt packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9, and 10 and the RHEL CoreOS kernels shipped with OpenShift 4 and 5. When a new NVMe-FC controller is in the CONNECTING state, an administrative request timeout schedules error-recovery work that aborts outstanding requests in both the admin and I/O tagsets. Because ctrl->queue_count is initialized early while the I/O tagset is not, the error handler can iterate over an I/O tagset that has not been created yet, producing kernel warnings (lockdep turning off the locking correctness validator) and potentially crashing the kernel. A malicious or unresponsive NVMe-FC target can trigger this behavior during connection setup, causing a denial of service. Red Hat rates this flaw Moderate because triggering it requires conditions on the local NVMe fabrics connection path and the impact is limited to availability; this is lower than the CVEORG score of 8.8 (Important), which assumes an unprivileged adjacent-network attacker with confidentiality and integrity impact that the current evidence does not demonstrate. Fixes for the affected Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift streams are currently deferred to future updates; the residual risk is limited to systems that use NVMe over Fibre Channel storage, where a failed or malicious target connection attempt could disrupt the host through the faulty error-recovery path. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 (including kernel-rt), RHEL 8.4, and the RHEL In-Vehicle OS (RHEL for Automotive) streams are marked not affected because the vulnerable code is not present.

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.

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.