CVE-2026-74745 eth: bnxt: avoid deadlock when canceling IRQ affinity notifier
A race condition in the bnxt network driver can cause a deadlock during IRQ affinity notifier cancellation, leading to a denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-74745?
CVE-2026-74745 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux, published on 26 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
eth: bnxt: avoid deadlock when canceling IRQ affinity notifier
Unregistering IRQ affinity notifiers waits for the callback synchronously. bnxt takes the netdev instance lock in the notifier (to restart the queue) and cancels the work under the same lock. This may obviously deadlock.
Move the restart to the async service task. The queue restart isn't super time sensitive. Store the new TPH tag, schedule the task. Safely canceling the service task is already ironed out.
In bnxt_request_irq() the order of registering notifier, affinity and initial TPH programming has to be inverted. I think it was racy previously since user may trigger an update as soon as notifier is installed.
There's a small known gap - if pcie_tph_get_cpu_st() fails at init and the target tag is 0 we may miss programming the entry. This does not seem worth fixing, the code has skip-on-failure all over the place, anyway.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-74745?
How do I fix CVE-2026-74745?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2026-74745 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-74745 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2026-74745, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-74745, GHSA-4frh-9v5h-wqj6, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-74745.