Bug 2546469 (CVE-2026-98324)

Summary: CVE-2026-98324 kernel: dmaengine: pxa: fix double counting of the hw descriptors
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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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: ---
Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's PXA Direct Memory Access (DMA) driver. A local user could trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) or memory corruption due to descriptor double-counting during allocation. When processing hardware descriptors, the driver incorrectly increments the descriptor counter, causing subsequent operations to reference or free unallocated memory entries and crash the system.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-06 09:25:50 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

dmaengine: pxa: fix double counting of the hw descriptors

pxad_alloc_desc() was converted from

        kzalloc(struct_size(sw_desc, hw_desc, nb_hw_desc), GFP_NOWAIT)

to kzalloc_flex(), which sets the __counted_by() counter sw_desc->nb_desc
itself - but only where the compiler has __builtin_counted_by_ref(), so
from gcc 15.1 or clang 22.1 on. The loop below it still increments
nb_desc, which makes it come out doubled there and correct elsewhere.

nb_desc is what pxad_free_desc() iterates over and what
set_updater_desc() indexes from, so set it explicitly and drop the
increment. The error path has to lower it to the number of descriptors
allocated so far, otherwise pxad_free_desc() would free entries that were
never allocated.