CVE-2025-38388

firmware: arm_ffa: Replace mutex with rwlock to avoid sleep in atomic context

published July 25, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
2.5
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

firmware: arm_ffa: Replace mutex with rwlock to avoid sleep in atomic context

The current use of a mutex to protect the notifier hashtable accesses

can lead to issues in the atomic context. It results in the below

kernel warnings:

| BUG: sleeping function called from invalid context at kernel/locking/mutex.c:258

| in_atomic(): 1, irqs_disabled(): 1, non_block: 0, pid: 9, name: kworker/0:0

| preempt_count: 1, expected: 0

| RCU nest depth: 0, expected: 0

| CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 9 Comm: kworker/0:0 Not tainted 6.14.0 #4

| Workqueue: ffa_pcpu_irq_notification notif_pcpu_irq_work_fn

| Call trace:

| show_stack+0x18/0x24 (C)

| dump_stack_lvl+0x78/0x90

| dump_stack+0x18/0x24

| __might_resched+0x114/0x170

| __might_sleep+0x48/0x98

| mutex_lock+0x24/0x80

| handle_notif_callbacks+0x54/0xe0

| notif_get_and_handle+0x40/0x88

| generic_exec_single+0x80/0xc0

| smp_call_function_single+0xfc/0x1a0

| notif_pcpu_irq_work_fn+0x2c/0x38

| process_one_work+0x14c/0x2b4

| worker_thread+0x2e4/0x3e0

| kthread+0x13c/0x210

| ret_from_fork+0x10/0x20

To address this, replace the mutex with an rwlock to protect the notifier

hashtable accesses. This ensures that read-side locking does not sleep and

multiple readers can acquire the lock concurrently, avoiding unnecessary

contention and potential deadlocks. Writer access remains exclusive,

preserving correctness.

This change resolves warnings from lockdep about potential sleep in

atomic context.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00132 · 2.5th percentile
Published
2025-07-25T12:53Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 25 JUL 12:53Z
    firmware: arm_ffa: Replace mutex with rwlock to avoid sleep in atomic context
    cvelistv5