High · published August 26, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
s390/vfio_ccw: Selectively expand io_mutex
The io_mutex was defined to serialize the io_regions, but then has
also sort of been associated with the I/O themselves because of
the close relationship they share.
With the handful of races that are possible, the choices are either to:
A) expand the scope of io_mutex to close these remaining windows, or
B) reduce the scope of io_mutex to just io_region, and introduce a new
lock mechanism for the remaining I/O resources
This patch implements A, since B brings with it a lot more interactions
that would need to be tracked and kept in a correct hierarchy. It also
takes advantage of the workqueue element for cp_free() that now gets
called out of fsm_notoper(), which could be invoked out of an interrupt
context and thus cannot acquire a mutex itself.