CVE-2026-46250 — MIPS: Work around LLVM bug when gp is used as global register variable

Affected: Linux

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

MIPS: Work around LLVM bug when gp is used as global register variable

On MIPS, __current_thread_info is defined as global register variable locating in $gp, and is simply assigned with new address during kernel relocation.

This however is broken with LLVM, which always restores $gp if it finds $gp is clobbered in any form, including when intentionally through a global register variable. This is against GCC's documentation[1], which requires a callee-saved register used as global register variable not to be restored if it's clobbered.

As a result, $gp will continue to point to the unrelocated kernel after the epilog of relocate_kernel(), leading to an early crash in init_idle,

[ 0.000000] CPU 0 Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 0000000000000000, epc == ffffffff81afada8, ra == ffffffff81afad90 [ 0.000000] Oops[#1]: [ 0.000000] CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Tainted: G W 6.19.0-rc5-00262-gd3eeb99bbc99-dirty #188 VOLUNTARY [ 0.000000] Tainted: [W]=WARN [ 0.000000] Hardware name: loongson,loongson64v-4core-virtio [ 0.000000] $ 0 : 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000001 0000000000000000 [ 0.000000] $ 4 : ffffffff80b80ec0 ffffffff80b53d48 0000000000000000 00000000000f4240 [ 0.000000] $ 8 : 0000000000000100 ffffffff81d82f80 ffffffff81d82f80 0000000000000001 [ 0.000000] $12 : 0000000000000000 ffffffff81776f58 00000000000…

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CVE-2026-46250 — MIPS: Work around LLVM bug when gp is used as global register variable