CVE-2026-43401

Name	CVE-2026-43401
Description	In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: cpufreq: intel_pstate: Fix NULL pointer dereference in update_cpu_qos_request() The update_cpu_qos_request() function attempts to initialize the 'freq' variable by dereferencing 'cpudata' before verifying if the 'policy' is valid. This issue occurs on systems booted with the "nosmt" parameter, where all_cpu_data[cpu] is NULL for the SMT sibling threads. As a result, any call to update_qos_requests() will result in a NULL pointer dereference as the code will attempt to access pstate.turbo_freq using the NULL cpudata pointer. Also, pstate.turbo_freq may be updated by intel_pstate_get_hwp_cap() after initializing the 'freq' variable, so it is better to defer the 'freq' until intel_pstate_get_hwp_cap() has been called. Fix this by deferring the 'freq' assignment until after the policy and driver_data have been validated. [ rjw: Added one paragraph to the changelog ]
Source	CVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source Package	Release	Version	Status
linux (PTS)	bullseye	5.10.223-1	fixed
	bullseye (security)	5.10.251-4	fixed
	bookworm	6.1.159-1	fixed
	bookworm (security)	6.1.170-1	fixed
	trixie	6.12.73-1	fixed
	trixie (security)	6.12.86-1	fixed
	forky	6.19.14-1	fixed
	sid	7.0.4-1	fixed

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

Package	Type	Release	Fixed Version
linux	source	bullseye	(not affected)
linux	source	bookworm	(not affected)
linux	source	trixie	(not affected)
linux	source	(unstable)	6.19.10-1

Notes

[trixie] - linux <not-affected> (Vulnerable code not present)
[bookworm] - linux <not-affected> (Vulnerable code not present)
[bullseye] - linux <not-affected> (Vulnerable code not present)
https://git.kernel.org/linus/ab39cc4cb8ceecdc2b61747433e7237f1ac2b789 (7.0-rc2)