CVE-2025-38690 drm/xe/migrate: prevent infinite recursion

Medium 5.5 Published 4 Sep 2025 Updated 11 May 2026

A local attacker can trigger infinite recursion in the Linux kernel's Xe driver, causing a stack overflow and system crash.

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-2025-38690?

CVE-2025-38690 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 4 Sep 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/migrate: prevent infinite recursion

If the buf + offset is not aligned to XE_CAHELINE_BYTES we fallback to using a bounce buffer. However the bounce buffer here is allocated on the stack, and the only alignment requirement here is that it's naturally aligned to u8, and not XE_CACHELINE_BYTES. If the bounce buffer is also misaligned we then recurse back into the function again, however the new bounce buffer might also not be aligned, and might never be until we eventually blow through the stack, as we keep recursing.

Instead of using the stack use kmalloc, which should respect the power-of-two alignment request here. Fixes a kernel panic when triggering this path through eudebug.

v2 (Stuart): - Add build bug check for power-of-two restriction - s/EINVAL/ENOMEM/

(cherry picked from commit 38b34e928a08ba594c4bbf7118aa3aadacd62fff)

Weakness: CWE-617

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38690?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2025-38690?

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-2025-38690 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38690 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-38690, GHSA-47v5-j4qc-p3gp, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38690.