CVE-2026-97904

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's CPU frequency scaling (cpufreq) subsystem. A race condition occurs because an internal synchronization lock is initialized only after its system filesystem (sysfs) entries are made accessible. A local user accessing these sysfs attributes during policy allocation could interact with the uninitialized lock, leading to a kernel crash and a Denial of Service (DoS).

A low impact race condition flaw was found in the Linux kernel's CPU frequency scaling (cpufreq) subsystem. In cpufreq_policy_alloc(), the policy rwsem is initialized only after kobject_init_and_add() has created the policy's sysfs directory and its default attributes. A local user with standard privileges who accesses these sysfs attributes during cpufreq policy allocation can reach a policy callback before the semaphore has been initialized, causing the kernel to crash and resulting in a denial of service. Confidentiality and integrity are not affected.

Although the Red Hat CVSS:3.1 base score for this flaw is 5.5 (Moderate) (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H), Red Hat rates the overall impact as Low because successful exploitation requires winning a narrow race window during cpufreq policy creation, limiting the practical consequence to availability.

This issue affects the kernel and kernel-rt packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9, and 10, the kernel packages in Red Hat In-Vehicle OS, and the RHEL CoreOS 8 and RHEL CoreOS 9 layers used by OpenShift Container Platform 4. For these affected products, fixes are currently deferred to a future update; the residual risk is that a local user could trigger a kernel crash (denial of service) during cpufreq policy allocation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Extended Lifecycle Support is out of support scope for this issue.

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.