CVE-2025-21880 drm/xe/userptr: fix EFAULT handling

What is CVE-2025-21880?

CVE-2025-21880 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 Mar 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:

drm/xe/userptr: fix EFAULT handling

Currently we treat EFAULT from hmm_range_fault() as a non-fatal error when called from xe_vm_userptr_pin() with the idea that we want to avoid killing the entire vm and chucking an error, under the assumption that the user just did an unmap or something, and has no intention of actually touching that memory from the GPU. At this point we have already zapped the PTEs so any access should generate a page fault, and if the pin fails there also it will then become fatal.

However it looks like it's possible for the userptr vma to still be on the rebind list in preempt_rebind_work_func(), if we had to retry the pin again due to something happening in the caller before we did the rebind step, but in the meantime needing to re-validate the userptr and this time hitting the EFAULT.

This explains an internal user report of hitting:

[ 191.738349] WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 157 at drivers/gpu/drm/xe/xe_res_cursor.h:158 xe_pt_stage_bind.constprop.0+0x60a/0x6b0 [xe] [ 191.738551] Workqueue: xe-ordered-wq preempt_rebind_work_func [xe] [ 191.738616] RIP: 0010:xe_pt_stage_bind.constprop.0+0x60a/0x6b0 [xe] [ 191.738690] Call Trace: [ 191.738692] <TASK> [ 191.738694] ? show_regs+0x69/0x80 [ 191.738698] ? __warn+0x93/0x1a0 [ 191.738703] ? xe_pt_stage_bind.constprop.0+0x60a/0x6b0 [xe] [ 191.738759] ? report_bug+0x18f/0x1a0 [ 191.738764] ? handle_bug+0x63/0xa0 [ 191.738767] ? exc_invalid_op+0x19/0x70 [ 191.738770] ? asm_exc_invalid_op+0x1b/0x20 [ 191.738777] ? xe_pt_stage_bind.constprop.0+0x60a/0x6b0 [xe] [ 191.738834] ? ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30 [ 191.738849] bind_op_prepare+0x105/0x7b0 [xe] [ 191.738906] ? dma_resv_reserve_fences+0x301/0x380 [ 191.738912] xe_pt_update_ops_prepare+0x28c/0x4b0 [xe] [ 191.738966] ? kmemleak_alloc+0x4b/0x80 [ 191.738973] ops_execute+0x188/0x9d0 [xe] [ 191.739036] xe_vm_rebind+0x4ce/0x5a0 [xe] [ 191.739098] ? trace_hardirqs_on+0x4d/0x60 [ 191.739112] preempt_rebind_work_func+0x76f/0xd00 [xe]

Followed by NPD, when running some workload, since the sg was never actually populated but the vma is still marked for rebind when it should be skipped for this special EFAULT case. This is confirmed to fix the user report.

v2 (MattB): - Move earlier. v3 (MattB): - Update the commit message to make it clear that this indeed fixes the issue.

(cherry picked from commit 6b93cb98910c826c2e2004942f8b060311e43618)

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-21880?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2025-21880?

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-2025-21880 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-21880 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 BELL-CVE-2025-21880, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-21880, GHSA-6fj2-q3x5-whq9, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2025-21880, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-21880.