Loading story…
Linux 7.2-rc3 includes a set of fixes for SEGA Dreamcast input drivers, addressing a long-standing crash in the Maple mouse driver and race-condition risks across the Maple keyboard, mouse, and joystick code. The updates were merged through the Linux input subsystem and correct missing driver-data handling as well as device-registration ordering problems that could destabilize Dreamcast hardware support.
The Maple mouse crash was traced to a possible null-pointer dereference tied to absent driver data, a flaw reported to have existed since 2017. The fixes were initiated by recent maintenance work from Florian Fuchs and are expected to improve stability for Linux users running Dreamcast hardware, following other Dreamcast-related kernel work this year such as GD-ROM driver fixes and discussion of a VMUFAT file-system driver that is not expected to be upstreamed.
See affected versions and whether adversaries are exploiting it.
6 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
Linux 7.2-rc3 incorporated a set of fixes for Dreamcast keyboard, mouse, and joystick drivers after Dmitry Torokhov merged changes correcting driver-data handling and device-registration ordering to address race conditions and stability issues.
A proposal for a VMUFAT file-system driver for Dreamcast memory units was put forward in 2026, though the reporting says it is unlikely to be accepted upstream.
Earlier in 2026, additional Dreamcast-related Linux kernel work included fixes for the GD-ROM driver.
Florian Fuchs began recent Dreamcast maintenance work by fixing a kernel crash in the Dreamcast Maple mouse driver caused by missing or unset driver data leading to a possible null pointer dereference.
The Dreamcast Maple mouse driver crash condition caused by a possible null pointer dereference had existed since 2017, indicating the bug dates back to that year.
Dmitry Torokhov's input subsystem update for Linux v7.2-rc2 included fixes for Sega Dreamcast Maple keyboard, mouse, and joystick drivers. The changes addressed a NULL pointer dereference in the Maple mouse driver and reordered driver-data initialization and input-device registration to prevent race conditions.
Vulnerabilities, threat actors, malware, products, organizations, and breaches Mallory has linked to this story.
See whether adversaries are exploiting this yet, and where the affected versions run in your environment.
3 references tracked. Mallory keeps watching after this page renders.
tomshardware.com
Open sourcephoronix.com
Open sourcelore.kernel.org
Open sourceMap indicators from this story to your assets and identify affected systems in minutes.
Every observed campaign, victim, and pivot linked to actors named in this story.
Malware, exploits, and IOCs connected to the activity described here.
YARA, Sigma, and Snort rules deployed to your SIEM as soon as they’re published.
Get matching new stories delivered to your team as they break — not the next morning.
Ask questions about this story and take action on the answers.
Other stories Mallory is tracking that overlap on entities, sources, or topic labels.
Linux **7.2** has been released with a broad set of platform, performance, filesystem, networking, virtualization, and driver updates, including Cache Aware Scheduling, `USB4STREAM`, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL support, storage improvements across XFS, Btrfs, Ext4, F2FS, NFS, SMB, NTFS, Ceph, and Device Mapper, and security-relevant additions such as Intel TDX support, KVM support for Intel MBEC and AMD GMET, Landlock enhancements, IMA updates, and TCP-AO support without a `libcrypto` dependency. The release also brings reported I/O gains on AMD and Intel systems, faster poll performance, graphics improvements for Intel Arc and other GPU stacks, and continued Rust-for-Linux progress. The final release incorporated several late fixes and reverts, including a new `tlbi=` boot parameter added through an x86 urgent pull request. The currently supported setting, `tlbi=ipi`, restores older IPI-based TLB flushing as a debugging and mitigation aid after recently discovered `INVLPGB` and `TLBSYNC` issues on AMD CPUs were suspected of contributing to user-space crashes when broadcast TLB flushing is used. Kernel developers also reverted the newer DRM fair scheduler after regressions, and the `tlbi=ipi` change is slated for backporting to stable kernel branches.
Aug 20, 2026
The Linux kernel's hardware monitoring (**HWMON**) subsystem received a set of fixes ahead of `Linux 7.2-rc7`, with maintainer Guenter Roeck saying most of the changes remediate **critical or high-severity bugs**. Reported issues included race conditions, calculation mistakes, possible out-of-bounds memory accesses, and potential overflows affecting HWMON code paths. The bugs were reported by **Sashiko**, an AI-driven bug-finding bot, highlighting how automated analysis tools are surfacing serious defects in widely used open-source software. The fixes add to a broader rise in Linux kernel patch activity tied to AI and LLM-assisted code review, as maintainers respond to newly identified reliability and security flaws.
Aug 10, 2026
Linux 7.3-rc3 disables EROFS LZ4 rolling decompression after AWS personnel identified rare LZ4 inputs that could corrupt data. The upstream LZ4 implementation can perform uncontrolled backward memory copies, violating EROFS's assumption that non-overlapping ranges are copied forward. The temporary mitigation favors correctness but can add substantial decompression memory use—up to 146 pages per request in a cited workload—partially offset by a reserved decompression-buffer pool. The release candidate also contains SMB client hardening, including fixes for a potential heap overflow in DACL rewriting, oversized-DACL rejection, and malformed read-response validation, along with a Landlock use-after-free fix. EROFS rolling decompression may return if upstream LZ4 provides the required copy-direction guarantees or EROFS adopts a maintained local implementation.
Sep 15, 2026