CVE-2025-21876: high-severity vulnerability in Linux
iommu/vt-d: Fix suspicious RCU usage
Published · Updated
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.8epss 0.2%
exploitation probability
0.2%top 89% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
iommu/vt-d: Fix suspicious RCU usage
Commit <d74169ceb0d2> ("iommu/vt-d: Allocate DMAR fault interrupts
locally") moved the call to enable_drhd_fault_handling() to a code
path that does not hold any lock while traversing the drhd list. Fix
it by ensuring the dmar_global_lock lock is held when traversing the
drhd list.
Without this fix, the following warning is triggered:
=============================
WARNING: suspicious RCU usage
6.14.0-rc3 #55 Not tainted
-----------------------------
drivers/iommu/intel/dmar.c:2046 RCU-list traversed in non-reader section!!
other info that might help us debug this:
rcu_scheduler_active = 1, debug_locks = 1
2 locks held by cpuhp/1/23:
#0: ffffffff84a67c50 (cpu_hotplug_lock){++++}-{0:0}, at: cpuhp_thread_fun+0x87/0x2c0
#1: ffffffff84a6a380 (cpuhp_state-up){+.+.}-{0:0}, at: cpuhp_thread_fun+0x87/0x2c0
stack backtrace:
CPU: 1 UID: 0 PID: 23 Comm: cpuhp/1 Not tainted 6.14.0-rc3 #55
Call Trace:
<TASK>
dump_stack_lvl+0xb7/0xd0
lockdep_rcu_suspicious+0x159/0x1f0
? __pfx_enable_drhd_fault_handling+0x10/0x10
enable_drhd_fault_handling+0x151/0x180
cpuhp_invoke_callback+0x1df/0x990
cpuhp_thread_fun+0x1ea/0x2c0
smpboot_thread_fn+0x1f5/0x2e0
? __pfx_smpboot_thread_fn+0x10/0x10
kthread+0x12a/0x2d0
? __pfx_kthread+0x10/0x10
ret_from_fork+0x4a/0x60
? __pfx_kthread+0x10/0x10
ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30
</TASK>
Holding the lock in enable_drhd_fault_handling() triggers a lockdep splat
about a possible deadlock between dmar_global_lock and cpu_hotplug_lock.
This is avoided by not holding dmar_global_lock when calling
iommu_device_register(), which initiates the device probe process.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
Linux · LinuxRelated CVEs — Linux
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