CVE-2026-98521 PUBLISHED

drm/i915: fix incorrect RCU teardown order

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 18.10.2026 Updated: 18.10.2026

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

drm/i915: fix incorrect RCU teardown order

i915_gem_busy_ioctl uses dma_resv_for_each_fence_unlocked() to iterate over the fences in an GEM object without holding a reference but only the RCU read side lock.

What can happen here is that the GEM object is destroyed concurrently while i915_gem_busy_ioctl is still running. This won't free the GEM objects memory, but still drops all the dma_fence references.

Now when dma_resv_for_each_fence_unlocked() sees a destroyed dma_fence it assumes that a new fence list was installed and re-starts the loop.

But in the case of a destroyed GEM object a new fence list is never installed, only the old one freed and therefore the iteration never finishes resulting in an endless loop.

The solution is to drop the fence references only after the RCU grace period.

The fixes tag is not necessary the patch introducing the problem, but the one making it so worse that we need to address it.

This problem was pointed out by Sashiko-bot.

(cherry picked from commit 5113479556025093bf8133bb2dcaa33be2d50921)

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 912ff2ebd695c582ca4cebf833ad73a378a99f23 to 4d4ca84213327da1f84ef7af3946dea6b14c5d88 (excl.)
  • affected from 912ff2ebd695c582ca4cebf833ad73a378a99f23 to c53db9cc245219af6b528ca022a17ebfa91d80ba (excl.)
  • affected from 912ff2ebd695c582ca4cebf833ad73a378a99f23 to b12e041aedcf9fa77c6002a49f07eb20d0521b86 (excl.)
  • affected from 912ff2ebd695c582ca4cebf833ad73a378a99f23 to cc890d3f1b15bf6481dc7270fba0b4fbba572813 (excl.)
  • affected from 912ff2ebd695c582ca4cebf833ad73a378a99f23 to 2dd0190e397ec6468095fd3e80e79276a7361449 (excl.)
  • affected from 912ff2ebd695c582ca4cebf833ad73a378a99f23 to d2da6696e0c4e60414706e607029d0bb0330c67e (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.17 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.17 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.1.189 to 6.1.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.6.158 to 6.6.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.112 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.55 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.9 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc5 to * (incl.)

References