Bug 2540518 (CVE-2026-93830)

Summary: CVE-2026-93830 kernel: net: stmmac: xgmac2: disable RBUE in default RX interrupt mask
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's stmmac network driver. An attacker can cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by sending high volumes of network traffic to an affected system. Under heavy packet load, the network controller exhausts its receive buffers and continuously fires hardware interrupts before software can refill them. This interrupt storm monopolizes processor resources, leading to severe performance degradation or system unresponsiveness.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-24 17:05:27 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: stmmac: xgmac2: disable RBUE in default RX interrupt mask

Enabling the RX Buffer Unavailable (RBUE) interrupt is counterproductive
and can trigger a MAC interrupt storm under heavy RX pressure. When the
DMA runs out of RX descriptors it fires RBUE continuously until software
refills the ring.

However, RBUE is redundant: the normal RX completion interrupt (RIE)
already triggers NAPI, which processes completed descriptors and refills
the ring, causing the DMA to resume. The RBUE handler itself only sets
handle_rx - the same outcome as RIE.

On Agilex5 under heavy RX pressure, the MAC interrupt (which includes
RBUE) was observed firing 1,821,811,555 times against only 2,618,627
actual RX completions - a ~695x ratio - confirming the severity of the
storm.

RBUE does not provide OOM recovery. If page_pool is exhausted,
stmmac_rx_refill() cannot advance the DMA tail pointer, the DMA stays
suspended, and RBUE fires again on the next NAPI completion - a storm
with no forward progress. This patch trades that storm for a clean
stall with the same RX outcome. Proper OOM recovery is a pre-existing
gap outside the scope of this fix.

Note: as a consequence of disabling RBUE, the rx_buf_unav_irq ethtool
counter will always read 0 on XGMAC2 devices. This behaviour is already
inconsistent across DWMAC core versions.

Remove RBUE from XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_EN and XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_RX
to prevent the interrupt storm while keeping normal RX handling intact.
Comment 1 Mauro Matteo Cascella 2026-09-29 09:13:12 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/plain/cve/published/2026/CVE-2026-93830.mbox