CVE-2022-50144

soundwire: revisit driver bind/unbind and callbacks

published June 18, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
8.5
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

soundwire: revisit driver bind/unbind and callbacks

In the SoundWire probe, we store a pointer from the driver ops into

the 'slave' structure. This can lead to kernel oopses when unbinding

codec drivers, e.g. with the following sequence to remove machine

driver and codec driver.

/sbin/modprobe -r snd_soc_sof_sdw

/sbin/modprobe -r snd_soc_rt711

The full details can be found in the BugLink below, for reference the

two following examples show different cases of driver ops/callbacks

being invoked after the driver .remove().

kernel: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000150

kernel: Workqueue: events cdns_update_slave_status_work [soundwire_cadence]

kernel: RIP: 0010:mutex_lock+0x19/0x30

kernel: Call Trace:

kernel: ? sdw_handle_slave_status+0x426/0xe00 [soundwire_bus 94ff184bf398570c3f8ff7efe9e32529f532e4ae]

kernel: ? newidle_balance+0x26a/0x400

kernel: ? cdns_update_slave_status_work+0x1e9/0x200 [soundwire_cadence 1bcf98eebe5ba9833cd433323769ac923c9c6f82]

kernel: BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: ffffffffc07654c8

kernel: Workqueue: pm pm_runtime_work

kernel: RIP: 0010:sdw_bus_prep_clk_stop+0x6f/0x160 [soundwire_bus]

kernel: Call Trace:

kernel: <TASK>

kernel: sdw_cdns_clock_stop+0xb5/0x1b0 [soundwire_cadence 1bcf98eebe5ba9833cd433323769ac923c9c6f82]

kernel: intel_suspend_runtime+0x5f/0x120 [soundwire_intel aca858f7c87048d3152a4a41bb68abb9b663a1dd]

kernel: ? dpm_sysfs_remove+0x60/0x60

This was not detected earlier in Intel tests since the tests first

remove the parent PCI device and shut down the bus. The sequence

above is a corner case which keeps the bus operational but without a

driver bound.

While trying to solve this kernel oopses, it became clear that the

existing SoundWire bus does not deal well with the unbind case.

Commit 528be501b7d4a ("soundwire: sdw_slave: add probe_complete structure and new fields")

added a 'probed' status variable and a 'probe_complete'

struct completion. This status is however not reset on remove and

likewise the 'probe complete' is not re-initialized, so the

bind/unbind/bind test cases would fail. The timeout used before the

'update_status' callback was also a bad idea in hindsight, there

should really be no timing assumption as to if and when a driver is

bound to a device.

An initial draft was based on device_lock() and device_unlock() was

tested. This proved too complicated, with deadlocks created during the

suspend-resume sequences, which also use the same device_lock/unlock()

as the bind/unbind sequences. On a CometLake device, a bad DSDT/BIOS

caused spurious resumes and the use of device_lock() caused hangs

during suspend. After multiple weeks or testing and painful

reverse-engineering of deadlocks on different devices, we looked for

alternatives that did not interfere with the device core.

A bus notifier was used successfully to keep track of DRIVER_BOUND and

DRIVER_UNBIND events. This solved the bind-unbind-bind case in tests,

but it can still be defeated with a theoretical corner case where the

memory is freed by a .remove while the callback is in use. The

notifier only helps make sure the driver callbacks are valid, but not

that the memory allocated in probe remains valid while the callbacks

are invoked.

This patch suggests the introduction of a new 'sdw_dev_lock' mutex

protecting probe/remove and all driver callbacks. Since this mutex is

'local' to SoundWire only, it does not interfere with existing locks

and does not create deadlocks. In addition, this patch removes the

'probe_complete' completion, instead we directly invoke the

'update_status' from the probe routine. That removes any sort of

timing dependency and a much better support for the device/driver

model, the driver could be bound before the bus started, or eons after

the bus started and the hardware would be properly initialized in all

cases.

BugLink: https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/is

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The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00193 · 8.5th percentile
Published
2025-06-18T11:03Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 18 JUN 11:03Z
    soundwire: revisit driver bind/unbind and callbacks
    cvelistv5