High · published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
wifi: ath11k: cancel SSR work items during PCI shutdown
A reboot can crash the kernel if it overlaps with WLAN firmware crash
recovery (SSR). The crash is a NULL pointer dereference in the MHI teardown
path while freeing DMA-backed MHI contexts.
Simplified trace:
dma_free_attrs
mhi_deinit_dev_ctxt [mhi]
ath11k_pci_power_down [ath11k_pci]
ath11k_pci_shutdown [ath11k_pci]
device_shutdown
kernel_restart
On the host side, SSR is driven by the MHI RDDM callback, which queues
reset_work to perform device recovery. reset_work power-cycles the device
by calling ath11k_hif_power_down() followed by ath11k_hif_power_up(). The
power-down phase deinitializes MHI and frees DMA resources.
Shutdown/reboot runs fully asynchronously with this RDDM-driven SSR
recovery flow. As a result, the shutdown path
(ath11k_pci_shutdown() -> ath11k_pci_power_down()) can race with the SSR
recovery sequence.
Fix this by canceling SSR-related work items during PCI shutdown, marking
the device as unregistering, and serializing the RDDM callback path that
checks and queues reset_work. This ensures that no new SSR recovery work
can be queued once teardown has started, and that any in-flight recovery
work is fully synchronized before device power-down, preventing MHI
teardown and DMA resource freeing from running more than once.
Note: This issue only affects PCI/MHI-based devices. AHB-based ath11k
devices do not queue reset_work in normal SSR flows.
Tested-on: WCN6855 hw2.1 PCI WLAN.HSP.1.1-04866.5-QCAHSPSWPL_V1_V2_SILICONZ_IOE-1