CVE-2026-43371 PUBLISHED

net: macb: Shuffle the tx ring before enabling tx

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 01.05.2026 Published: 08.05.2026 Updated: 08.05.2026

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

net: macb: Shuffle the tx ring before enabling tx

Quanyang observed that when using an NFS rootfs on an AMD ZynqMp board, the rootfs may take an extended time to recover after a suspend. Upon investigation, it was determined that the issue originates from a problem in the macb driver.

According to the Zynq UltraScale TRM [1], when transmit is disabled, the transmit buffer queue pointer resets to point to the address specified by the transmit buffer queue base address register.

In the current implementation, the code merely resets queue->tx_head and queue->tx_tail to '0'. This approach presents several issues:

  • Packets already queued in the tx ring are silently lost, leading to memory leaks since the associated skbs cannot be released.

  • Concurrent write access to queue->tx_head and queue->tx_tail may occur from macb_tx_poll() or macb_start_xmit() when these values are reset to '0'.

  • The transmission may become stuck on a packet that has already been sent out, with its 'TX_USED' bit set, but has not yet been processed. However, due to the manipulation of 'queue->tx_head' and 'queue->tx_tail', macb_tx_poll() incorrectly assumes there are no packets to handle because queue->tx_head == queue->tx_tail. This issue is only resolved when a new packet is placed at this position. This is the root cause of the prolonged recovery time observed for the NFS root filesystem.

To resolve this issue, shuffle the tx ring and tx skb array so that the first unsent packet is positioned at the start of the tx ring. Additionally, ensure that updates to queue->tx_head and queue->tx_tail are properly protected with the appropriate lock.

[1] https://docs.amd.com/v/u/en-US/ug1085-zynq-ultrascale-trm

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from d89b8b17057e16fad4564c71160e68ca549c1b42 to c6783bfa31a59f34fe4feb1bdbf67791ef3fb0b7 (excl.)
  • affected from ec4445ae9e58aed88561d3d1dfa849b039c7782e to 0a47c3889fcd843c72aa57fa8c4d06f5801fced4 (excl.)
  • affected from 6e704e89f16fd4a1145756210bc210f14f174f94 to 88f974fe118cb4653f029929ecbca7cfe06132ae (excl.)
  • affected from 316d9fe71fb18bc9b1dba464fdb68dd201315eba to 58f5d34f88e8f00910b692537f7b2efdb8c3705d (excl.)
  • affected from b3a7aa33ca7d46be513fccf832d3540acfe587d0 to 403182e0771b250cfde0fe7e1081d095ceaf8230 (excl.)
  • affected from bf9cf80cab81e39701861a42877a28295ade266f to 881a0263d502e1a93ebc13a78254e9ad19520232 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 6.1.165 to 6.1.167 (excl.)
  • affected from 6.6.128 to 6.6.130 (excl.)
  • affected from 6.12.75 to 6.12.78 (excl.)
  • affected from 6.18.16 to 6.18.20 (excl.)
  • affected from 6.19.6 to 6.19.9 (excl.)

References