Medium [CVE-2026-72314] regulator_lock_two should test for EDEADLK not EDEADLOCK
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-72314 affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
Aggregated and source-linked by VulniPulse. Data sources, validation and limitations.
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Summary
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: regulator: core: regulator_lock_two() should test for EDEADLK not EDEADLOCK Compare against -EDEADLK, which is what ww_mutex_lock() actually returns and what every other deadlock check in this file already uses.
Function regulator_lock_two() acquires two regulators via regulator_lock_nested() -> ww_mutex_lock(). On contention, ww_mutex_lock() returns -EDEADLK, which is the caller's signal to drop the lock it holds and retry the acquisition in the canonical order.
However, regulator_lock_two() tests the return value against -EDEADLOCK rather than -EDEADLK. On most architectures, EDEADLK and EDEADLOCK are the same value, so the comparison happens to be correct and the bug is invisible.
But on MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC, those two errors have different values. The test is wrong: a genuine -EDEADLK backoff no longer matches -EDEADLOCK, so instead of unlocking and retrying, the code falls into WARN_ON(ret) and returns with only one of the two regulators locked.
In practice, this is a bug only on MIPS, because the regulator core is not built or used on the other two platforms. In general, EDEADLK is preferred over EDEADLOCK for new code.
The `regulator_lock_two()` function, responsible for acquiring two regulators, incorrectly checks for an error code (`EDEADLOCK`) instead of the correct one (`EDEADLK`).
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 24 days ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 24 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation
The source record does not include mitigation steps. That is not a statement that no fix exists — read the vendor advisory below for the authoritative guidance.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 24 days ago·verify at source
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