CVE-2022-50721 dmaengine: qcom-adm: fix wrong calling convention for prep_slave_sg
A kernel panic occurs in the qcom-adm DMA driver due to incorrect error handling, causing a denial of service for local attackers.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2022-50721?
CVE-2022-50721 is a vulnerability in Linux, published on 24 Dec 2025. 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:
dmaengine: qcom-adm: fix wrong calling convention for prep_slave_sg
The calling convention for pre_slave_sg is to return NULL on error and provide an error log to the system. Qcom-adm instead provide error pointer when an error occur. This indirectly cause kernel panic for example for the nandc driver that checks only if the pointer returned by device_prep_slave_sg is not NULL. Returning an error pointer makes nandc think the device_prep_slave_sg function correctly completed and makes the kernel panics later in the code.
While nandc is the one that makes the kernel crash, it was pointed out that the real problem is qcom-adm not following calling convention for that function.
To fix this, drop returning error pointer and return NULL with an error log.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-50721?
How do I fix CVE-2022-50721?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2022-50721 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-50721 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-50721, GHSA-9gcm-5rwh-p2jv, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2022-50721, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-50721.