CVE-2026-90211: bpf, s390: Clear fetch destination on faulting arena atomic

Published Sep 17, 2026
·
Updated

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

bpf, s390: Clear fetch destination on faulting arena atomic

Same missing register clear as on riscv64. A RMW atomic on an arena pointer is converted to BPFPROBEATOMIC and gets an exception table entry, but bpfjitprobeatomicpre() only fills in the arena base and the probe offset, leaving probe->reg at the -1 that bpfjitprobeinit() set, which bpfjitprobepost() writes into the entry and exhandlerbpf() then reads back as "there is nothing to clear".

That is right for a plain BPF{ADD,AND,OR,XOR}, which only writes memory, but an RMW carrying BPFFETCH also reads the old value into a register: srcreg for BPF{ADD,AND,OR,XOR} | BPFFETCH and BPFXCHG, and r0 for BPFCMPXCHG. So on a fault over an unmapped arena page the program resumes at the landing pad with whatever that register held before the atomic instead of the 0 that every other BPFPROBE access delivers.

Fill probe->reg in from bpfatomicloadreg(). Unlike x86-64 and arm64, s390x does not report arena violations from its exception handler, so there is no access direction to correct here, only the missing register clear.

Affected Software

1 affected component
Linux Linux kernel

Event History

Sep 17, 2026
CVE Published
via MITRE·04:07 PM
Data Sourced
via MITRE·04:07 PM
Description

Frequently Asked Questions

1

Which deployments are exposed to this issue?

The issue is specific to the Linux kernel BPF JIT on s390x. It requires a BPF program to perform a read-modify-write atomic operation with a fetched result against an arena pointer that faults on an unmapped arena page.

2

What is the effect of a fault during an affected atomic operation?

After the fault, the BPF program can resume with the destination register retaining its pre-atomic value rather than being cleared to zero. The affected destination is the source register for fetched ADD, AND, OR, or XOR operations and XCHG, or r0 for CMPXCHG.

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