Jitterentropy Vulnerability in Linux Kernel Affecting Performance

CVE-2026-52936

What is CVE-2026-52936?

A concurrency issue has been identified in the Linux kernel's jitterentropy implementation, where a spinlock is used to serialize access to the shared jitterentropy state. This design can cause performance stalling during entropy generation due to parallel readers contending for the same lock. To address this, replacing the spinlock with a mutex allows contended readers to sleep, improving performance and ensuring smoother operation during critical entropy generation processes.

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