CVE-2025-23129 wifi: ath11k: Clear affinity hint before calling ath11k_pcic_free_irq() in error path
A missing affinity hint cleanup in the ath11k WiFi driver error path causes a kernel warning, potentially leading to system instability or 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-2025-23129?
CVE-2025-23129 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 16 Apr 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:
wifi: ath11k: Clear affinity hint before calling ath11k_pcic_free_irq() in error path
If a shared IRQ is used by the driver due to platform limitation, then the IRQ affinity hint is set right after the allocation of IRQ vectors in ath11k_pci_alloc_msi(). This does no harm unless one of the functions requesting the IRQ fails and attempt to free the IRQ. This results in the below warning:
WARNING: CPU: 7 PID: 349 at kernel/irq/manage.c:1929 free_irq+0x278/0x29c Call trace: free_irq+0x278/0x29c ath11k_pcic_free_irq+0x70/0x10c [ath11k] ath11k_pci_probe+0x800/0x820 [ath11k_pci] local_pci_probe+0x40/0xbc
The warning is due to not clearing the affinity hint before freeing the IRQs.
So to fix this issue, clear the IRQ affinity hint before calling ath11k_pcic_free_irq() in the error path. The affinity will be cleared once again further down the error path due to code organization, but that does no harm.
Tested-on: QCA6390 hw2.0 PCI WLAN.HST.1.0.1-05266-QCAHSTSWPLZ_V2_TO_X86-1
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-23129?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-23129?
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-2025-23129 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-23129 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-23129, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-23129, GHSA-ch3q-jhhp-7w44, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2025-23129, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-13-CVE-2025-23129, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2025-23129 and 1 more.