TLDRVuln - Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities Made Simple

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

powerpc/perf: Fix ref-counting on the PMU 'vpa_pmu'

Commit 176cda0619b6 ("powerpc/perf: Add perf interface to expose vpa

counters") introduced 'vpa_pmu' to expose Book3s-HV nested APIv2 provided

L1<->L2 context switch latency counters to L1 user-space via

perf-events. However the newly introduced PMU named 'vpa_pmu' doesn't

assign ownership of the PMU to the module 'vpa_pmu'. Consequently the

module 'vpa_pmu' can be unloaded while one of the perf-events are still

active, which can lead to kernel oops and panic of the form below on a

Pseries-LPAR:

BUG: Kernel NULL pointer dereference on read at 0x00000058

<snip>

NIP [c000000000506cb8] event_sched_out+0x40/0x258

LR [c00000000050e8a4] __perf_remove_from_context+0x7c/0x2b0

Call Trace:

[c00000025fc3fc30] [c00000025f8457a8] 0xc00000025f8457a8 (unreliable)

[c00000025fc3fc80] [fffffffffffffee0] 0xfffffffffffffee0

[c00000025fc3fcd0] [c000000000501e70] event_function+0xa8/0x120

<snip>

Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!

Fix this by adding the module ownership to 'vpa_pmu' so that the module

'vpa_pmu' is ref-counted and prevented from being unloaded when perf-events

are initialized.