CVE-2026-93084 PUBLISHED

firmware: arm_scmi: Drop handle on protocol bind failures

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 17.09.2026 Published: 17.09.2026 Updated: 17.09.2026

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

firmware: arm_scmi: Drop handle on protocol bind failures

The SCMI bus notifier acquires an SCMI handle when the driver core emits BUS_NOTIFY_BIND_DRIVER, before invoking the protocol driver probe callback. The protocol probe path only checks whether sdev->handle is set.

If device_link_add() fails after the handle has been acquired, the protocol device can still bind with a valid handle but without the dependency link to the SCMI parent. A concurrent parent unbind can then miss the child and tear down the SCMI instance while the child still holds a handle into it.

If the protocol driver probe later fails, for example with -EPROBE_DEFER, the driver core emits BUS_NOTIFY_DRIVER_NOT_BOUND rather than BUS_NOTIFY_UNBOUND_DRIVER. The SCMI notifier only released the handle on BUS_NOTIFY_UNBOUND_DRIVER, so each failed protocol-device bind leaked the SCMI instance users refcount and left sdev->handle set after the failed probe.

Make the link helper report failure and drop the acquired handle if the link cannot be created. Also handle BUS_NOTIFY_DRIVER_NOT_BOUND in the same cleanup path used for unbind so failed probes balance the earlier BUS_NOTIFY_BIND_DRIVER acquisition.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 971fc0665f1361f23251e4d85fac4aed1b683505 to 0f860db24ee95e5da4866303a35e55098b9641b3 (excl.)
  • affected from 971fc0665f1361f23251e4d85fac4aed1b683505 to df273eced7cec550465fd1bb82a5d2c3c7d3c437 (excl.)
  • affected from 971fc0665f1361f23251e4d85fac4aed1b683505 to a54dc23e8bd2246c28eafffa60b4634f0d1a11cc (excl.)
  • affected from 971fc0665f1361f23251e4d85fac4aed1b683505 to 77d2985d1e80e67f32026fc03e975c4c83cc543d (excl.)
  • affected from 971fc0665f1361f23251e4d85fac4aed1b683505 to e3a5c30d233ca5d3e799a80da806554c703bda13 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 6.3 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 6.3 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.6.157 to 6.6.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.110 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.52 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.6 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc1 to * (incl.)

References