CVE-2026-89517: sched_ext: Fix rq->core_pick corruption under core scheduling

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@kernel.org>

Description
===========

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

sched_ext: Fix rq->core_pick corruption under core scheduling

Core scheduling's pick_next_task() picks what to run on every SMT sibling of
the core in a single pass under the shared core-wide rq lock. The selection
state is consistent only while the lock is held continuously, so
->pick_task() originally could not release it. However, since 4c95380701f5
("sched/ext: Fold balance_scx() into pick_task_scx()"), sched_ext runs
dispatch from inside the pick and dispatching can drop the rq lock. To
support this, pick_next_task() has been updated to restart the whole
selection when a pick returns RETRY_TASK after releasing the lock.

When selections on the same core interleave through the dropped lock, they
corrupt each other's state: one clears the other's rq->core_pick leading to
a NULL deref, or invalidates its keep-the-previous-task decision leaving a
dequeued task running, which deadlocks the next wakeup and matches the
reported hard hangs. A cookied ping-pong load on an SMT machine makes the
interleavings frequent and kills the kernel within seconds.

Fix it by making the pick return RETRY_TASK whenever dispatch released the
rq lock, so that a selection only ever commits picks made under a
continuously held lock. The previous patch's rq->scx.lock_drop_seq counts
the releases. A dispatch that touched nothing never releases the lock and
its verdict, including "nothing to run", stands: retries are bounded, each
following a dispatch that actually did something, and an idle CPU does not
loop.

If another dispatch is already in flight on the rq, skip dispatching and
pick from what is already queued locally - the in-flight dispatch has
released the lock, so its own selection will retry and re-pick this rq,
while returning RETRY_TASK here would only spin on the lock that dispatch
needs to finish.

Balance callbacks must run in the context that queued them, so they can only
be queued on the CPU's own rq. When dispatching for another rq, run the
deferred work directly instead - that rq may consume all its picks through
the core-sched fast path and never queue the callback itself.

The put_prev_task_scx() warning about a runnable task being left behind
assumed that dispatch ran as part of the very pick that is switching away.
That now only holds on the non-core path, so gate it and drop the
cookie-match test, which is always true without core scheduling, from its
condition.

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2026-89517 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Issue introduced in 6.19 with commit 4c95380701f58b8112f0b891de8d160e4199e19d and fixed in 7.2.4 with commit cdafb68155bee2d5c4e50c12e4606323e9334e6b
	Issue introduced in 6.19 with commit 4c95380701f58b8112f0b891de8d160e4199e19d and fixed in 7.3-rc1 with commit d954004205c1a1d3f59ce8482b559266c15600fa

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2026-89517
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	kernel/sched/ext/ext.c


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cdafb68155bee2d5c4e50c12e4606323e9334e6b
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d954004205c1a1d3f59ce8482b559266c15600fa