CVE-2026-43401: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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 ]

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 6.18, before 6.18.19 (fixed in 6.18.19); from 6.19, before 6.19.9 (fixed in 6.19.9); version 7.0 only

Published 2026-05-08. Last modified 2026-06-17.