CVE-2026-98050

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. This vulnerability can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS) due to a race condition in the Mellanox switch (mlxsw) driver. When handling Precision Time Protocol (PTP) traffic, the garbage-collection workqueue and the network polling thread may concurrently modify shared packet lists across different processor cores. A remote attacker capable of inducing packet timestamp timeouts can trigger this flaw to corrupt kernel memory lists, resulting in a system crash.

This vulnerability is rated as having Moderate impact for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because exploitation requires specific Mellanox Spectrum hardware accelerators and precise timing conditions, resulting in an unrecoverable kernel panic rather than arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation. Systems lacking Mellanox Spectrum network switch hardware or not running Precision Time Protocol (PTP) services are not exposed. Triggering the race condition requires concurrently processing incoming PTP packets while packet timestamp timeout cleanups occur across multiple CPU cores, making reliable exploitation difficult.

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.