CVE-2026-43229 media: chips-media: wave5: Fix device cleanup order to prevent kernel panic
A race condition in the wave5 media driver causes kernel panics during device removal, leading to 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-2026-43229?
CVE-2026-43229 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 6 May 2026. 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:
media: chips-media: wave5: Fix device cleanup order to prevent kernel panic
Move video device unregistration to the beginning of the remove function to ensure all video operations are stopped before cleaning up the worker thread and disabling PM runtime. This prevents hardware register access after the device has been powered down.
In polling mode, the hrtimer periodically triggers wave5_vpu_timer_callback() which queues work to the kthread worker. The worker executes wave5_vpu_irq_work_fn() which reads hardware registers via wave5_vdi_read_register().
The original cleanup order disabled PM runtime and powered down hardware before unregistering video devices. When autosuspend triggers and powers off the hardware, the video devices are still registered and the worker thread can still be triggered by the hrtimer, causing it to attempt reading registers from powered-off hardware. This results in a bus error (synchronous external abort) and kernel panic.
This causes random kernel panics during encoding operations:
Internal error: synchronous external abort: 0000000096000010 [#1] PREEMPT SMP Modules linked in: wave5 rpmsg_ctrl rpmsg_char ... CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 1520 Comm: vpu_irq_thread Tainted: G M W pc : wave5_vdi_read_register+0x10/0x38 [wave5] lr : wave5_vpu_irq_work_fn+0x28/0x60 [wave5] Call trace: wave5_vdi_read_register+0x10/0x38 [wave5] kthread_worker_fn+0xd8/0x238 kthread+0x104/0x120 ret_from_fork+0x10/0x20 Code: aa1e03e9 d503201f f9416800 8b214000 (b9400000) ---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]--- Kernel panic - not syncing: synchronous external abort: Fatal exception
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-43229?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2026-43229?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2026-43229 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-43229 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2026-43229, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-43229, GHSA-7vr5-gjv8-9p58, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2026-43229, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-43229.