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medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38720 json

net: hibmcge: fix rtnl deadlock issue

published last yr. modified 21d ago also EUVD-2025-26749

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 1%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

net: hibmcge: fix rtnl deadlock issue

Currently, the hibmcge netdev acquires the rtnl_lock in pci_error_handlers.reset_prepare() and releases it in pci_error_handlers.reset_done().

However, in the PCI framework: pci_reset_bus - __pci_reset_slot - pci_slot_save_and_disable_locked - pci_dev_save_and_disable - err_handler->reset_prepare(dev);

In pci_slot_save_and_disable_locked(): list_for_each_entry(dev, &slot->bus->devices, bus_list) { if (!dev->slot || dev->slot!= slot) continue; pci_dev_save_and_disable(dev); if (dev->subordinate) pci_bus_save_and_disable_locked(dev->subordinate); }

This will iterate through all devices under the current bus and execute err_handler->reset_prepare(), causing two devices of the hibmcge driver to sequentially request the rtnl_lock, leading to a deadlock.

Since the driver now executes netif_device_detach() before the reset process, it will not concurrently with other netdev APIs, so there is no need to hold the rtnl_lock now.

Therefore, this patch removes the rtnl_lock during the reset process and adjusts the position of HBG_NIC_STATE_RESETTING to ensure that multiple resets are not executed concurrently.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.15.11, 6.16.2, 6.17

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-38720 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: net: hibmcge: fix rtnl deadlock issue

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.12% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 1% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

References

Sources

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