In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: scsi: core: Fix bad pointer dereference when ehandler kthread is invalid Commit 66a834d09293 ("scsi: core: Fix error handling of scsi_host_alloc()") changed the allocation logic to call put_device() to perform host cleanup with the assumption that IDA removal and stopping the kthread would properly be performed in scsi_host_dev_release(). However, in the unlikely case that the error handler thread fails to spawn, shost->ehandler is set to ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM). The error handler cleanup code in scsi_host_dev_release() will call kthread_stop() if shost->ehandler != NULL which will always be the case whether the kthread was successfully spawned or not. In the case that it failed to spawn this has the nasty side effect of trying to dereference an invalid pointer when kthread_stop() is called. The following splat provides an example of this behavior in the wild: scsi host11: error handler thread failed to spawn, error = -4…