CVE-2025-37843

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

PCI: pciehp: Avoid unnecessary device replacement check

Hot-removal of nested PCI hotplug ports suffers from a long-standing race condition which can lead to a deadlock: A parent hotplug port acquires pci_lock_rescan_remove(), then waits for pciehp to unbind from a child hotplug port. Meanwhile that child hotplug port tries to acquire pci_lock_rescan_remove() as well in order to remove its own children.

The deadlock only occurs if the parent acquires pci_lock_rescan_remove() first, not if the child happens to acquire it first.

Several workarounds to avoid the issue have been proposed and discarded over the years, e.g.:

https://lore.kernel.org/r/4c882e25194ba8282b78fe963fec8faae7cf23eb.1529173804.git.lukas@wunner.de/

A proper fix is being worked on, but needs more time as it is nontrivial and necessarily intrusive.

Recent commit 9d573d19547b (PCI: pciehp: Detect device replacement during system sleep) provokes more frequent occurrence of the deadlock when removing more than one Thunderbolt device during system sleep. The commit sought to detect device replacement, but also triggered on device removal. Differentiating reliably between replacement and removal is impossible because pci_get_dsn() returns 0 both if the device was removed, as well as if it was replaced with one lacking a Device Serial Number.

Avoid the more frequent occurrence of the deadlock by checking whether the hotplug port itself was hot-removed. If so, theres no sense in checking whether its child device was replaced.

This works because the ->resume_noirq() callback is invoked in top-down order for the entire hierarchy: A parent hotplug port detecting device replacement (or removal) marks all children as removed using pci_dev_set_disconnected() and a child hotplug port can then reliably detect being removed.

Weakness

The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.

Affected Software

Extended Description

Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.

Potential Mitigations

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/25.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/27.html

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0d0bbd01f7c0ac7d1be9f85aaf2cd0baec34655f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7535d10a2c61baeff493300070cf04d9ddda216b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e3260237aaadc9799107ccb940c6688195c4518d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e4a1d7defbc2d806540720a5adebe24ec3488683