CVE-2023-53656 drivers/perf: hisi: Don't migrate perf to the CPU going to teardown
A race condition in the HiSilicon PCIe PMU driver can cause a kernel deadlock during CPU teardown, leading to a denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-53656?
CVE-2023-53656 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 7 Oct 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:
drivers/perf: hisi: Don't migrate perf to the CPU going to teardown
The driver needs to migrate the perf context if the current using CPU going to teardown. By the time calling the cpuhp::teardown() callback the cpu_online_mask() hasn't updated yet and still includes the CPU going to teardown. In current driver's implementation we may migrate the context to the teardown CPU and leads to the below calltrace:
... [ 368.104662][ T932] task:cpuhp/0 state:D stack: 0 pid: 15 ppid: 2 flags:0x00000008 [ 368.113699][ T932] Call trace: [ 368.116834][ T932] __switch_to+0x7c/0xbc [ 368.120924][ T932] __schedule+0x338/0x6f0 [ 368.125098][ T932] schedule+0x50/0xe0 [ 368.128926][ T932] schedule_preempt_disabled+0x18/0x24 [ 368.134229][ T932] __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x1d4/0x5dc [ 368.139617][ T932] __mutex_lock_slowpath+0x1c/0x30 [ 368.144573][ T932] mutex_lock+0x50/0x60 [ 368.148579][ T932] perf_pmu_migrate_context+0x84/0x2b0 [ 368.153884][ T932] hisi_pcie_pmu_offline_cpu+0x90/0xe0 [hisi_pcie_pmu] [ 368.160579][ T932] cpuhp_invoke_callback+0x2a0/0x650 [ 368.165707][ T932] cpuhp_thread_fun+0xe4/0x190 [ 368.170316][ T932] smpboot_thread_fn+0x15c/0x1a0 [ 368.175099][ T932] kthread+0x108/0x13c [ 368.179012][ T932] ret_from_fork+0x10/0x18 ...
Use function cpumask_any_but() to find one correct active cpu to fixes this issue.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-53656?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2023-53656?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2023-53656 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-53656 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-53656, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53656, GHSA-3f5v-f3mc-6rj8, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-53656.