CVE-2025-38703: drm/xe: Make dma-fences compliant with the safe access rules

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-38703 is a high (CVSS 7.8) Use After Free vulnerability in linux. EPSS estimates a 0.17% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 6.2% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 04-09-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 05-08-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/xe: Make dma-fences compliant with the safe access rules Xe can free some of the data pointed to by the dma-fences it exports. Most notably the timeline name can get freed if userspace closes the associated submit queue. At the same time the fence could have been exported to a third party (for example a sync_fence fd) which will then cause an use- after-free on subsequent access. To make this safe we need to make the driver compliant with the newly documented dma-fence rules. Driver has to ensure a RCU grace period between signalling a fence and freeing any data pointed to by said fence. For the timeline name we simply make the queue be freed via kfree_rcu and for the shared lock associated with multiple queues we add a RCU grace period before freeing the per GT structure holding the lock.

• CWE-416Use After FreeThe product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.