CVE-2026-99158

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's ring buffer component. When a reader process accessing memory-mapped trace data catches up with a concurrent writer still committing events, the kernel incorrectly treats the temporary absence of data as an error and triggers a kernel warning. A local user could trigger this condition during simultaneous read and write operations, potentially causing a Denial of Service (DoS) on systems configured to panic on kernel warnings.

This vulnerability is rated as having Moderate impact because exploitation requires local administrative privileges to interact with kernel tracing and service disruption occurs only on hosts explicitly set to treat warnings as fatal kernel panics. In standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux configurations, warning events do not crash the operating system, so a race between concurrent trace reading and writing generates a non-fatal diagnostic report. As a result, unprivileged users cannot exploit this behavior to cause a system outage or compromise system confidentiality or integrity.

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.