CVE-2026-43331

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

x86/kexec: Disable KCOV instrumentation after load_segments()

The loadsegments() function changes segment registers, invalidating GS base (which KCOV relies on for per-cpu data). When CONFIGKCOV is enabled, any subsequent instrumented C code call (e.g. nativegdtinvalidate()) begins crashing the kernel in an endless loop.

To reproduce the problem, it's sufficient to do kexec on a KCOV-instrumented kernel:

$ kexec -l /boot/otherKernel $ kexec -e

The real-world context for this problem is enabling crash dump collection in syzkaller. For this, the tool loads a panic kernel before fuzzing and then calls makedumpfile after the panic. This workflow requires both CONFIGKEXEC and CONFIGKCOV to be enabled simultaneously.

Adding safeguards directly to the KCOV fast-path (_sanitizercovtracepc()) is also undesirable as it would introduce an extra performance overhead.

Disabling instrumentation for the individual functions would be too fragile, so disable KCOV instrumentation for the entire machinekexec64.c and physaddr.c. If coverage-guided fuzzing ever needs these components in the future, other approaches should be considered.

The problem is not relevant for 32 bit kernels as CONFIG_KCOV is not supported there.

[ bp: Space out comment for better readability. ]