Home Embedded Vulns General Vulns

CVE-2025-38305

Our Analysis: Embedded

Our model has classified this vulnerability as relevant to Embedded Systems, helping your team prioritize efforts effectively.

Published Date July 10, 2025
Last Modified July 10, 2025
CVSS Vector Not Available

Description

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

ptp: remove ptp->n_vclocks check logic in ptp_vclock_in_use()

There is no disagreement that we should check both ptp->is_virtual_clock
and ptp->n_vclocks to check if the ptp virtual clock is in use.

However, when we acquire ptp->n_vclocks_mux to read ptp->n_vclocks in
ptp_vclock_in_use(), we observe a recursive lock in the call trace
starting from n_vclocks_store().

============================================
WARNING: possible recursive locking detected
6.15.0-rc6 #1 Not tainted
--------------------------------------------
syz.0.1540/13807 is trying to acquire lock:
ffff888035a24868 (&ptp->n_vclocks_mux){+.+.}-{4:4}, at:
ptp_vclock_in_use drivers/ptp/ptp_private.h:103 [inline]
ffff888035a24868 (&ptp->n_vclocks_mux){+.+.}-{4:4}, at:
ptp_clock_unregister+0x21/0x250 drivers/ptp/ptp_clock.c:415

but task is already holding lock:
ffff888030704868 (&ptp->n_vclocks_mux){+.+.}-{4:4}, at:
n_vclocks_store+0xf1/0x6d0 drivers/ptp/ptp_sysfs.c:215

other info that might help us debug this:
Possible unsafe locking scenario:

CPU0
----
lock(&ptp->n_vclocks_mux);
lock(&ptp->n_vclocks_mux);

*** DEADLOCK ***
....
============================================

The best way to solve this is to remove the logic that checks
ptp->n_vclocks in ptp_vclock_in_use().

The reason why this is appropriate is that any path that uses
ptp->n_vclocks must unconditionally check if ptp->n_vclocks is greater
than 0 before unregistering vclocks, and all functions are already
written this way. And in the function that uses ptp->n_vclocks, we
already get ptp->n_vclocks_mux before unregistering vclocks.

Therefore, we need to remove the redundant check for ptp->n_vclocks in
ptp_vclock_in_use() to prevent recursive locking.