CVE-2025-38331

net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP

published July 10, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
29.0
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP

It is desireable to push the hardware accelerator to also

process non-segmented TCP frames: we pass the skb->len

to the "TOE/TSO" offloader and it will handle them.

Without this quirk the driver becomes unstable and lock

up and and crash.

I do not know exactly why, but it is probably due to the

TOE (TCP offload engine) feature that is coupled with the

segmentation feature - it is not possible to turn one

part off and not the other, either both TOE and TSO are

active, or neither of them.

Not having the TOE part active seems detrimental, as if

that hardware feature is not really supposed to be turned

off.

The datasheet says:

"Based on packet parsing and TCP connection/NAT table

lookup results, the NetEngine puts the packets

belonging to the same TCP connection to the same queue

for the software to process. The NetEngine puts

incoming packets to the buffer or series of buffers

for a jumbo packet. With this hardware acceleration,

IP/TCP header parsing, checksum validation and

connection lookup are offloaded from the software

processing."

After numerous tests with the hardware locking up after

something between minutes and hours depending on load

using iperf3 I have concluded this is necessary to stabilize

the hardware.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00364 · 29.0th percentile
Published
2025-07-10T08:15Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 10 JUL 08:15Z
    net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP
    cvelistv5