CVE-2024-38618: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ALSA: timer: Set lower bound of start tick time Currently ALSA timer doesn't have the lower limit of the start tick time, and it allows a very small size, e.g. 1 tick with 1ns resolution for hrtimer. Such a situation may lead to an unexpected RCU stall, where the callback repeatedly queuing the expire update, as reported by fuzzer. This patch introduces a sanity check of the timer start tick time, so that the system returns an error when a too small start size is set. As of this patch, the lower limit is hard-coded to 100us, which is small enough but can still work somehow.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: before 4.19.316 (fixed in 4.19.316); from 4.20, before 5.4.278 (fixed in 5.4.278); from 5.5, before 5.10.219 (fixed in 5.10.219); from 5.11, before 5.15.161 (fixed in 5.15.161); from 5.16, before 6.1.93 (fixed in 6.1.93); from 6.2, before 6.6.33 (fixed in 6.6.33); …

Published 2024-06-19. Last modified 2026-06-17.