CVE-2026-46148 spi: microchip-core-qspi: control built-in cs manually

What is CVE-2026-46148?

CVE-2026-46148 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 28 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:

spi: microchip-core-qspi: control built-in cs manually

The coreQSPI IP supports only a single chip select, which is automagically operated by the hardware - set low when the transmit buffer first gets written to and set high when the number of bytes written to the TOTALBYTES field of the FRAMES register have been sent on the bus. Additional devices must use GPIOs for their chip selects. It was reported to me that if there are two devices attached to this QSPI controller that the in-built chip select is set low while linux tries to access the device attached to the GPIO.

This went undetected as the boards that connected multiple devices to the SPI controller all exclusively used GPIOs for chip selects, not relying on the built-in chip select at all. It turns out that this was because the built-in chip select, when controlled automagically, is set low when active and high when inactive, thereby ruling out its use for active-high devices or devices that need to transmit with the chip select disabled.

Modify the driver so that it controls chip select directly, retaining the behaviour for mem_ops of setting the chip select active for the entire duration of the transfer in the exec_op callback. For regular transfers, implement the set_cs callback for the core to use.

As part of this, the existing setup callback, mchp_coreqspi_setup_op(), is removed. Modifying the CLKIDLE field is not safe to do during operation when there are multiple devices, so this code is removed entirely. Setting the MASTER and ENABLE fields is something that can be done once at probe, it doesn't need to be re-run for each device. Instead the new setup callback sets the built-in chip select to its inactive state for active-low devices, as the reset value of the chip select in software controlled mode is low.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-46148?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-46148?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2026-46148 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-46148 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-2026-46148, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-46148, GHSA-v9m3-f9j3-xrv6, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2026-46148, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-13-CVE-2026-46148, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2026-46148 and 1 more.