CVE-2026-99079

net/mlx5e: Prevent stale XSK buffer release on refill retry

State
Published
Severity
9.8 Critical
Published
Oct 23, 2026
Updated
Oct 24, 2026
Reserved
Sep 25, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

net/mlx5e: Prevent stale XSK buffer release on refill retry

When an XDP redirect to an AF_XDP socket fails because its RX ring is full, the XSK core frees the buffer. During the subsequent batched refill of a legacy cyclic RQ, mlx5e also releases the WQE's XSK buffer before allocating a replacement. If that refill succeeds only partially, a WQE left without a replacement retains its old buffer pointer.

The buffer can meanwhile be allocated to another WQE. A later refill retry can then free the live buffer through the stale pointer and publish the same UMEM frame twice.

Mark the WQE as released immediately after the driver-side free. The flag is already cleared when a replacement buffer is assigned, so refill retries no longer release stale pointers.

The failure is silent and produces no kernel warning or splat. A standalone legacy cyclic-RQ zero-copy libxsk reproducer, using 64-byte UDP traffic offered at 12 Mpps, detected it: stock stopped after 2,854,914 packets in 4.094 seconds, with 4,542 xdp_rx_ring_full events and 64 ownership/double-publication errors. With this change it processed 356,904,225 packets in 30 seconds despite 571,405 xdp_rx_ring_full events, with no ownership or data errors.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.19.8 CriticalCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HLinux

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 3f93f82988bc6b4104314bf9aa485d47fbb7e241 to before 32bbb870078d467479965c21bbc4960c57eea208Affected
  • 3f93f82988bc6b4104314bf9aa485d47fbb7e241 to before 34d1db2b18e1c1d189e34dd51923e031815f88e3Affected
  • 3f93f82988bc6b4104314bf9aa485d47fbb7e241 to before 639522e5056cade578a324acfa993ec6c9f7f5dcAffected
  • 3f93f82988bc6b4104314bf9aa485d47fbb7e241 to before 655f47477054d19de3b138840be229a1a4490d0cAffected
  • 3f93f82988bc6b4104314bf9aa485d47fbb7e241 to before e01620844c5c88b6fcf819d171df8e3976a0e76fAffected
LinuxLinux
  • 6.4Affected
  • before 6.4Not affected
  • 6.6.160 through 6.6.*Not affected
  • 6.12.113 through 6.12.*Not affected
  • 6.18.57 through 6.18.*Not affected
  • 7.2.11 through 7.2.*Not affected
  • 7.3 and laterNot affected

References

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