UBUNTU-CVE-2026-99268: Medium severity ubuntu/linux vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: iouring: wake ring pollers for local taskwork With IORINGSETUPDEFERTASKRUN completions are queued as local work, and only become CQEs when the submitter enters the kernel to wait for events. For an application that finds out via poll() or epoll on the ring fd when it is time to do that, iouringpoll() reports EPOLLIN if local work is pending. That only helps if the work is there at the time of the call. When DEFERTASKRUN was added, ioreqlocalworkadd() did iocqringwake(), which took care of tasks sleeping in poll() as well. Then polling got a wait queue of its own, ->pollwq, and the wake up in ioreqlocalworkadd() was replaced by waking the submitter directly. Since then ->pollwq is only woken when CQEs are committed, which for such a ring is done by the very task that is waiting to be told to: submitter completion poll(ringfd) iouringpoll() // nothing yet schedule() ioreqlocalworkadd() // ->cqwaitnr: nobody waits // sleeps on Wake ->pollwq when the first entry is put on the work list. Like for the eventfd, that must not be done right away if the work is queued from a wake up handler, as the chain of wake ups could get back to the wait queue whose lock is held. Use an RCU callback in that case, with a reference to the ring.
Affected Software
Event History
Frequently Asked Questions
Which deployments are most likely to encounter this issue?
Applications using io_uring rings created with IORING_SETUP_DEFER_TASKRUN and using poll() or epoll on the ring file descriptor to learn when completions require processing are the relevant workload. The affected Ubuntu kernel package families listed are linux, linux-fips, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oracle, linux-aws-fips, and linux-azure-fips.
What behavior would indicate that an application is affected?
A submitter can enter poll() or epoll waiting on the ring descriptor before local task_work is queued, then remain asleep after that work is added. The queued work does not become completion queue entries until the submitter re-enters the kernel, creating a missed-wakeup condition.