CVE-2021-47429 powerpc/64s: Fix unrecoverable MCE calling async handler from NMI

What is CVE-2021-47429?

CVE-2021-47429 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 21 May 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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

powerpc/64s: Fix unrecoverable MCE calling async handler from NMI

The machine check handler is not considered NMI on 64s. The early handler is the true NMI handler, and then it schedules the machine_check_exception handler to run when interrupts are enabled.

This works fine except the case of an unrecoverable MCE, where the true NMI is taken when MSR[RI] is clear, it can not recover, so it calls machine_check_exception directly so something might be done about it.

Calling an async handler from NMI context can result in irq state and other things getting corrupted. This can also trigger the BUG at arch/powerpc/include/asm/interrupt.h:168 BUG_ON(!arch_irq_disabled_regs(regs) && !(regs->msr & MSR_EE));

Fix this by making an _async version of the handler which is called in the normal case, and a NMI version that is called for unrecoverable interrupts.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-47429?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2021-47429?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2021-47429 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-47429 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2021-47429, GHSA-g8c8-mwvp-jcrr, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-47429.