CVE-2026-89927 — KVM: x86: hyper-v: Clamp stimer deadline to avoid livelock

Affected: Linux

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

KVM: x86: hyper-v: Clamp stimer deadline to avoid livelock

Fix an issue where userspace or the guest can program an Hyper-V synthetic timer to have a deadline in the past via integer overflow, preventing the CPU from making progress and triggering an RCU stall.

Hyper-V's SynIC exposes 4 per-vCPU synthetic timers to the guest, which are emulated by KVM. Each is programmed through the HV_X64_MSR_STIMERi_CONFIG and HV_X64_MSR_STIMERi_COUNT MSRs. Depending on CONFIG, COUNT represents either the absolute expiration time or the period of a periodic timer, both expressed in 100ns ticks. These timers may be set both by the guest (WRMSR) and the host (KVM_SET_MSRS).

When the timer is enabled, stimer_start() translates COUNT to an absolute monotonic deadline and arms an hrtimer. If COUNT is set to a value close to U64_MAX, the deadline calculation can overflow.

ktime_add_ns(ktime_now, 100 * (stimer->exp_time - time_now))

This can result in a CPU livelock. stimer_start() arms the timer via hrtimer_start() with a deadline in the past, which causes it to immediately fire. The stimer callback then raises KVM_RQ_HV_STIMER, with the intention of causing KVM to deliver a synthetic interrupt on the next vCPU guest enter.

Then, once userspace issues KVM_RUN, vcpu_enter_guest() consumes the request, calling kvm_hv_process_stimers(). This would normally disable the timer via stimer_expiration() once the deadline is in…

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CVE-2026-89927 — KVM: x86: hyper-v: Clamp stimer deadline to avoid livelock