CVE-2022-49783 x86/fpu: Drop fpregs lock before inheriting FPU permissions

What is CVE-2022-49783?

CVE-2022-49783 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 1 May 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/fpu: Drop fpregs lock before inheriting FPU permissions

Mike Galbraith reported the following against an old fork of preempt-rt but the same issue also applies to the current preempt-rt tree.

BUG: sleeping function called from invalid context at kernel/locking/spinlock_rt.c:46 in_atomic(): 1, irqs_disabled(): 0, non_block: 0, pid: 1, name: systemd preempt_count: 1, expected: 0 RCU nest depth: 0, expected: 0 Preemption disabled at: fpu_clone CPU: 6 PID: 1 Comm: systemd Tainted: G E (unreleased) Call Trace: <TASK> dump_stack_lvl ? fpu_clone __might_resched rt_spin_lock fpu_clone ? copy_thread ? copy_process ? shmem_alloc_inode ? kmem_cache_alloc ? kernel_clone ? __do_sys_clone ? do_syscall_64 ? __x64_sys_rt_sigprocmask ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode ? do_syscall_64 ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode ? do_syscall_64 ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode ? do_syscall_64 ? exc_page_fault ? entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe </TASK>

Mike says:

The splat comes from fpu_inherit_perms() being called under fpregs_lock(), and us reaching the spin_lock_irq() therein due to fpu_state_size_dynamic() returning true despite static key __fpu_state_size_dynamic having never been enabled.

Mike's assessment looks correct. fpregs_lock on a PREEMPT_RT kernel disables preemption so calling spin_lock_irq() in fpu_inherit_perms() is unsafe. This problem exists since commit

9e798e9aa14c ("x86/fpu: Prepare fpu_clone() for dynamically enabled features").

Even though the original bug report should not have enabled the paths at all, the bug still exists.

fpregs_lock is necessary when editing the FPU registers or a task's FP state but it is not necessary for fpu_inherit_perms(). The only write of any FP state in fpu_inherit_perms() is for the new child which is not running yet and cannot context switch or be borrowed by a kernel thread yet. Hence, fpregs_lock is not protecting anything in the new child until clone() completes and can be dropped earlier. The siglock still needs to be acquired by fpu_inherit_perms() as the read of the parent's permissions has to be serialised.

[ bp: Cleanup splat. ]

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-49783?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-49783?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2022-49783 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-49783 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-49783, GHSA-g5p7-q8gg-6qmf, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2022-49783, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49783.