CVE-2025-38356 drm/xe/guc: Explicitly exit CT safe mode on unwind
A race condition in the Linux kernel's Xe GPU driver during probe failure can trigger a warning and potential instability by destroying a workqueue with pending tasks.
- 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-2025-38356?
CVE-2025-38356 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 25 Jul 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/guc: Explicitly exit CT safe mode on unwind
During driver probe we might be briefly using CT safe mode, which is based on a delayed work, but usually we are able to stop this once we have IRQ fully operational. However, if we abort the probe quite early then during unwind we might try to destroy the workqueue while there is still a pending delayed work that attempts to restart itself which triggers a WARN.
This was recently observed during unsuccessful VF initialization:
[ ] xe 0000:00:02.1: probe with driver xe failed with error -62 [ ] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [ ] workqueue: cannot queue safe_mode_worker_func [xe] on wq xe-g2h-wq [ ] WARNING: CPU: 9 PID: 0 at kernel/workqueue.c:2257 __queue_work+0x287/0x710 [ ] RIP: 0010:__queue_work+0x287/0x710 [ ] Call Trace: [ ] delayed_work_timer_fn+0x19/0x30 [ ] call_timer_fn+0xa1/0x2a0
Exit the CT safe mode on unwind to avoid that warning.
(cherry picked from commit 2ddbb73ec20b98e70a5200cb85deade22ccea2ec)
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38356?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-38356?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2025-38356 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38356 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-38356, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38356, GHSA-w3wq-ghx5-h8rc, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38356.