What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-97981: net: ethernet: cortina: Count dropped frames as NAPI work

• Severity: unknown
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-25 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: ethernet: cortina: Count dropped frames as NAPI work The RX loop only consumes budget when it successfully delivers a frame. Error paths keep consuming descriptors without reducing the budget, so a stream of bad frames can process the entire receive ring in one poll. Move the budget accounting to a common end-of-frame path. This counts each completed frame as NAPI work whether it was delivered or dropped, matching the behavior of the vendor driver.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 4.16 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/27b5753077d1cfda5fe201d2ba602de76a9a09b1
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5754e0c0758805096ecfeaf4c1b146ad51ed246f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/58140f1cebb776d174dc6ff41c15401654a5b1ea
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/620b7184808b25cf58268856f892b9ba83c181fd
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9620e2ce9b5998ebbf157241f296f8ddb92285c2
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b856c552f556bc0341c1dbe0bf88e630fd1dc4b7
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cceb6cd7f0e5ed2944a9ca22443d7b9da82f60ab
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e858b9b1ea3cbbc353189d07dec40dc16967e290

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