published December 9, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
of: overlay: Call of_changeset_init() early
When of_overlay_fdt_apply() fails, the changeset may be partially
applied, and the caller is still expected to call of_overlay_remove() to
clean up this partial state.
However, of_overlay_apply() calls of_resolve_phandles() before
init_overlay_changeset(). Hence if the overlay fails to apply due to an
unresolved symbol, the overlay_changeset.cset.entries list is still
uninitialized, and cleanup will crash with a NULL-pointer dereference in
overlay_removal_is_ok().
Fix this by moving the call to of_changeset_init() from
init_overlay_changeset() to of_overlay_fdt_apply(), where all other
early initialization is done.