CVE-2026-99164 spi: imx: fix slab corruption from undersized DMA bounce buffers
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-99164?
CVE-2026-99164 is a vulnerability in Linux, published on 28 Oct 2026.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
spi: imx: fix slab corruption from undersized DMA bounce buffers
Since commit faa8e404ad8e ("spi: imx: support dynamic burst length for ECSPI DMA mode"), the driver allocates its private DMA TX/RX buffers with kzalloc(dma_len), where dma_len is only rounded up to 4 bytes, but maps, syncs and unmaps them with DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len), i.e. rounded up to the cache line size. As a result, the DMA API operates on memory beyond the end of the allocation.
This was observed on a custom i.MX8MP platform with an mcp251xfd CAN controller under heavy RPMSG load, as a series of refcount_t warnings triggered from rpmsg_recv_done() in virtio_rpmsg_bus:
refcount_t: addition on 0; use-after-free. refcount_t: underflow; use-after-free. refcount_t: saturated; leaking memory.
Leading finally to an "Unable to handle kernel paging request" oops. Reproducing this problem took between 30 minutes and roughly 30 hours under the same workload.
Hardware watchpoints on the refcount of a struct rpmsg_endpoint showed it was overwritten from 2 to 1 by __pi_memcpy_generic() in the irq/155-spi2.0 thread. Additionally it was found that a "normal" rpmsg_recv_done() took 11µs +/-2µs from its kref_get to kref_put. In the error case the same sequence took about 215µs +/-10µs. Based on this, an LLM was used to identify the size mismatch fixed here.
Allocate the buffers with DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len) so they cover the full mapped length, and use the same length for dma_sync_single_for_cpu() to stay consistent with map and unmap.
With this patch applied, the same workload ran for more than 200 hours without the problem reproducing.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-99164?
How do I fix CVE-2026-99164?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
Is CVE-2026-99164 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-99164 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2026-99164, GHSA-6p78-3986-725v, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-99164.