CVE-2025-39737
- Published: 2025-09-11T17:15:35.173
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/kmemleak: avoid soft lockup in __kmemleak_do_cleanup()
A soft lockup warning was observed on a relative small system x86-64
system with 16 GB of memory when running a debug kernel with kmemleak
enabled.
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup – CPU#8 stuck for 33s! [kworker/8:1:134]
The test system was running a workload with hot unplug happening in
parallel. Then kemleak decided to disable itself due to its inability to
allocate more kmemleak objects. The debug kernel has its
CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_MEM_POOL_SIZE set to 40,000.
The soft lockup happened in kmemleak_do_cleanup() when the existing
kmemleak objects were being removed and deleted one-by-one in a loop via a
workqueue. In this particular case, there are at least 40,000 objects
that need to be processed and given the slowness of a debug kernel and the
fact that a raw_spinlock has to be acquired and released in
__delete_object(), it could take a while to properly handle all these
objects.
As kmemleak has been disabled in this case, the object removal and
deletion process can be further optimized as locking isn’t really needed.
However, it is probably not worth the effort to optimize for such an edge
case that should rarely happen. So the simple solution is to call
cond_resched() at periodic interval in the iteration loop to avoid soft
lockup.
Related CVE by CWE
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How to fix CVE-2025-39737
Description: In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/kmemleak: avoid soft lockup in __kmemleak_do_cleanup() A soft lockup warning was observed on a relative small system x86-64 system with 16 GB of memory when running a debug kernel with kmemleak enabled. watchdog: BUG: soft lockup – CPU#8 stuck for 33s! [kworker/8:1:134] The test system […]
Exploit Difficulty: HARD
⏱️ Time to exploit: > 4 hours
🛠️ Required skills: Advanced security expertise
💰 Public exploits: Rare or not public
How to Fix:
- Check if you're running the affected product
- Update to the latest patched version
- If patching is not immediately possible: restrict network exposure, apply least-privilege access
- Test the fix in a staging environment first
- Review logs for signs of exploitation
- Monitor for IOCs (Indicators of Compromise)
- Enable automatic security updates
- Set up vulnerability monitoring
- Review and harden security configurations
Exploit Difficulty Assessment
Vulnerability Timeline
CVE details first published to NVD database
Added to this CVE tracking system
Detection Rules & IOCs
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No vendor/product data available.