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CVE-2025-38311

Our Analysis: General-Purpose

Our model has classified this vulnerability as relevant to General-Purpose 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:

iavf: get rid of the crit lock

Get rid of the crit lock.
That frees us from the error prone logic of try_locks.

Thanks to netdev_lock() by Jakub it is now easy, and in most cases we were
protected by it already - replace crit lock by netdev lock when it was not
the case.

Lockdep reports that we should cancel the work under crit_lock [splat1],
and that was the scheme we have mostly followed since [1] by Slawomir.
But when that is done we still got into deadlocks [splat2]. So instead
we should look at the bigger problem, namely "weird locking/scheduling"
of the iavf. The first step to fix that is to remove the crit lock.
I will followup with a -next series that simplifies scheduling/tasks.

Cancel the work without netdev lock (weird unlock+lock scheme),
to fix the [splat2] (which would be totally ugly if we would kept
the crit lock).

Extend protected part of iavf_watchdog_task() to include scheduling
more work.

Note that the removed comment in iavf_reset_task() was misplaced,
it belonged to inside of the removed if condition, so it's gone now.

[splat1] - w/o this patch - The deadlock during VF removal:
WARNING: possible circular locking dependency detected
sh/3825 is trying to acquire lock:
((work_completion)(&(&adapter->watchdog_task)->work)){+.+.}-{0:0}, at: start_flush_work+0x1a1/0x470
but task is already holding lock:
(&adapter->crit_lock){+.+.}-{4:4}, at: iavf_remove+0xd1/0x690 [iavf]
which lock already depends on the new lock.

[splat2] - when cancelling work under crit lock, w/o this series,
see [2] for the band aid attempt
WARNING: possible circular locking dependency detected
sh/3550 is trying to acquire lock:
((wq_completion)iavf){+.+.}-{0:0}, at: touch_wq_lockdep_map+0x26/0x90
but task is already holding lock:
(&dev->lock){+.+.}-{4:4}, at: iavf_remove+0xa6/0x6e0 [iavf]
which lock already depends on the new lock.

[1] fc2e6b3b132a ("iavf: Rework mutexes for better synchronisation")
[2] https://github.com/pkitszel/linux/commit/52dddbfc2bb60294083f5711a158a