CVE-2022-48817: net: dsa: ar9331: register the mdiobus under devres

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-07-16 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: dsa: ar9331: register the mdiobus under devres As explained in commits: 74b6d7d13307 ("net: dsa: realtek: register the MDIO bus under devres") 5135e96a3dd2 ("net: dsa: don't allocate the slave_mii_bus using devres") mdiobus_free() will panic when called from devm_mdiobus_free() <- devres_release_all() <- __device_release_driver(), and that mdiobus was not previously unregistered. The ar9331 is an MDIO device, so the initial set of constraints that I thought would cause this (I2C or SPI buses which call ->remove on ->shutdown) do not apply. But there is one more which applies here. If the DSA master itself is on a bus that calls ->remove from ->shutdown (like dpaa2-eth, which is on the fsl-mc bus), there is a device link between the switch and the DSA master, and device_links_unbind_consumers() will unbind the ar9331 switch driver on shutdown. So the same treatment must be applied to all DSA switch drivers, which is: either use devres for both the mdiobus allocation and registration, or don't use devres at all. The ar9331 driver doesn't have a complex code structure for mdiobus removal, so just replace of_mdiobus_register with the devres variant in order to be all-devres and ensure that we don't free a still-registered bus.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 5.9 before 5.10.101; from 5.11 before 5.15.24; from 5.16 before 5.16.10; 5.17-rc1, 5.17-rc2, 5.17-rc3 — fixed in 5.10.101, 5.15.24, 5.16.10

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.10.101, 5.15.24, 5.16.10. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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