published October 6, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
wifi: ath11k: cleanup arsta in ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all()
When mac80211 removes a sta, it calls .sta_state() which in turn calls
ath11k_mac_station_remove(). In that function we clean up both peers &
arsta related resources.
But when the firmware crashes, ath11k calls ieee80211_restart_hw(), which
assumes that all driver related resources are cleaned up beforehand. This
cleanup is supposedly done by ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all() but does not
in fact free arsta->rx_stats / tx_stats.
Extract the arsta cleanup from ath11k_mac_station_remove() into a
new ath11k_mac_station_cleanup() and call it from both there and
ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all().
This should handle kmemleaks reports like:
unreferenced object 0xffffff801ae66400 (size 1024):
comm "hostapd", pid 1306, jiffies 4295011565
hex dump (first 32 bytes):
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
backtrace (crc d61c08ec):
kmemleak_alloc+0x3c/0x50
__kmalloc_cache_noprof+0x2b0/0x3e0
ath11k_mac_op_sta_state+0x1dc/0xb10
drv_sta_state+0xac/0x6f8
sta_info_insert_rcu+0x314/0x5e0
sta_info_insert+0x14/0x38
ieee80211_add_station+0x10c/0x1a0
nl80211_new_station+0x3e8/0x680
genl_family_rcv_msg_doit+0xc0/0x120
genl_rcv_msg+0x1b4/0x258
netlink_rcv_skb+0x4c/0x108
genl_rcv+0x38/0x60
netlink_unicast+0x190/0x278
netlink_sendmsg+0x15c/0x370
____sys_sendmsg+0x120/0x290
___sys_sendmsg+0x70/0xa0
Tested-on: QCN9074 hw1.0 PCI WLAN.HK.2.9.0.1-01977-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1