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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Dec 30, 2025· Updated Apr 15, 2026

CVE-2023-54316

CVE-2023-54316

Description

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

refscale: Fix uninitalized use of wait_queue_head_t

Running the refscale test occasionally crashes the kernel with the following error:

[ 8569.952896] BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: ffffffffffffffe8 [ 8569.952900] #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode [ 8569.952902] #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page [ 8569.952904] PGD c4b048067 P4D c4b049067 PUD c4b04b067 PMD 0 [ 8569.952910] Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT_RT SMP NOPTI [ 8569.952916] Hardware name: Dell Inc. PowerEdge R750/0WMWCR, BIOS 1.2.4 05/28/2021 [ 8569.952917] RIP: 0010:prepare_to_wait_event+0x101/0x190 : [ 8569.952940] Call Trace: [ 8569.952941] [ 8569.952944] ref_scale_reader+0x380/0x4a0 [refscale] [ 8569.952959] kthread+0x10e/0x130 [ 8569.952966] ret_from_fork+0x1f/0x30 [ 8569.952973]

The likely cause is that init_waitqueue_head() is called after the call to the torture_create_kthread() function that creates the ref_scale_reader kthread. Although this init_waitqueue_head() call will very likely complete before this kthread is created and starts running, it is possible that the calling kthread will be delayed between the calls to torture_create_kthread() and init_waitqueue_head(). In this case, the new kthread will use the waitqueue head before it is properly initialized, which is not good for the kernel's health and well-being.

The above crash happened here:

static inline void __add_wait_queue(...) { : if (!(wq->flags & WQ_FLAG_PRIORITY)) <=== Crash here

The offset of flags from list_head entry in wait_queue_entry is -0x18. If reader_tasks[i].wq.head.next is NULL as allocated reader_task structure is zero initialized, the instruction will try to access address 0xffffffffffffffe8, which is exactly the fault address listed above.

This commit therefore invokes init_waitqueue_head() before creating the kthread.

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