CVE-2026-89578 dm-io: clone the source bio instead of copying its biovec
A local attacker can cause a system hang in the Linux kernel by triggering a loop in dm-io during misaligned direct I/O operations.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-89578?
CVE-2026-89578 is a denial of service vulnerability in Linux, published on 11 Sep 2026. 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:
dm-io: clone the source bio instead of copying its biovec
For DM_IO_BIO requests, do_region() built each destination bio by walking the source bio's biovec and re-adding the pages one at a time, tracking the remaining transfer in sectors. The vector lengths are byte granular and need not be sector aligned (e.g. a misaligned O_DIRECT buffer split across pages), so the sector-based accounting could lose a sub-sector fragment: to_sector() truncated the remainder and the outer loop spun forever submitting empty bios, hanging the I/O.
There is no need to rebuild the biovec at all. The destination reads into (or writes from) exactly the same pages as the source bio, so the bio can simply clone the source's biovec with bio_alloc_clone() and remap it to the target device. The clone inherits the source's iterator and alignment, and the block layer splits it to the target's limits on submission, so the whole region maps to a single cloned bio with no manual page copying or sector accounting.
This removes the per-page copy path (and its open-coded bvec dpages helpers) for bio-backed I/O and fixes the hang on misaligned direct I/O to a dm-mirror device. Page-list, vma and kmem sources keep the existing copy path.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-89578?
How do I fix CVE-2026-89578?
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-2026-89578 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-89578 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2026-89578, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-89578, GHSA-36gx-2j3f-6gcr, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-89578.