Linux Kernel Daily: Race Conditions and Rushed Requests
The 7.3 merge window brought in six major subsystem pulls dominated by one theme: use-after-free and time-of-check-to-time-of-use bugs across storage and networking stacks. SCSI, block, and driver core fixes all converged on race conditions that matter for anyone running production storage.
Duration: PT2M15S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-09-06T06:01:48Z
- Audio duration: PT2M15S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
It's September 6th, 2026, and this is Linux Kernel Daily.
Today's merges tell one consistent story: race conditions in storage and I/O paths are getting hunted down hard this cycle.
Start with SCSI, pulled in commit 0d9ff90. The mpi3mr driver got a use-after-free fix on target device refresh, plus a separate null pointer dereference in port handling. Right alongside it, the bsg layer fixed a time-of-check-to-time-of-use bug in io_uring passthrough command setup. Two different drivers, same…
That pattern continues in the block pull, commit d0fc310. Jens Axboe's tree fixed an out-of-bounds write in nvme-tcp triggered by an over-long protocol data unit, plus cleanup-ordering leaks in nvmet-tcp and nvmet-rdma. These are the kind of bugs that surface under load or adversarial input, not in normal testing.
Driver core, in commit 9f0346d, adds a smaller but related fix: kernfs was silently dropping security extended attributes — SELinux labels — when a node had no allocated inode attributes. Easy to miss, real security-relevant behavior change.
Second theme: LoongArch's KVM fixes, commit 214f4ae, read like a checklist of the same failure modes — a time-of-check-to-time-of-use race on…
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