CVE-2026-99164

spi: imx: fix slab corruption from undersized DMA bounce buffers

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
Oct 28, 2026
Updated
Oct 28, 2026
Reserved
Sep 25, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

spi: imx: fix slab corruption from undersized DMA bounce buffers

Since commit faa8e404ad8e ("spi: imx: support dynamic burst length for ECSPI DMA mode"), the driver allocates its private DMA TX/RX buffers with kzalloc(dma_len), where dma_len is only rounded up to 4 bytes, but maps, syncs and unmaps them with DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len), i.e. rounded up to the cache line size. As a result, the DMA API operates on memory beyond the end of the allocation.

This was observed on a custom i.MX8MP platform with an mcp251xfd CAN controller under heavy RPMSG load, as a series of refcount_t warnings triggered from rpmsg_recv_done() in virtio_rpmsg_bus:

refcount_t: addition on 0; use-after-free. refcount_t: underflow; use-after-free. refcount_t: saturated; leaking memory.

Leading finally to an "Unable to handle kernel paging request" oops. Reproducing this problem took between 30 minutes and roughly 30 hours under the same workload.

Hardware watchpoints on the refcount of a struct rpmsg_endpoint showed it was overwritten from 2 to 1 by __pi_memcpy_generic() in the irq/155-spi2.0 thread. Additionally it was found that a "normal" rpmsg_recv_done() took 11µs +/-2µs from its kref_get to kref_put. In the error case the same sequence took about 215µs +/-10µs. Based on this, an LLM was used to identify the size mismatch fixed here.

Allocate the buffers with DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len) so they cover the full mapped length, and use the same length for dma_sync_single_for_cpu() to stay consistent with map and unmap.

With this patch applied, the same workload ran for more than 200 hours without the problem reproducing.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • faa8e404ad8e686cb98c51dc507fdcacfb8020ce to before 2777f6637da02da84c9c1ff92f413ce0f0995084Affected
  • faa8e404ad8e686cb98c51dc507fdcacfb8020ce to before 59eb22641f0c526dd064390b11cff99ae87c2858Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 7.0Affected
  • before 7.0Not affected
  • 7.2.13 through 7.2.*Not affected
  • 7.3 and laterNot affected

References

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