Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's Wave5 video processing driver can cause the entire system to crash (kernel panic). This occurs when the hardware incorrectly enters a low-power sleep mode while still being accessed by the system. An attacker with local access could exploit this to disrupt operations and cause a denial-of-service.
Technical details
The vulnerability is caused by a race condition between the Wave5 VPU driver's runtime power management and its hardware access routines. Specifically, the device could enter a suspend state due to an autosuspend timeout while the driver was still attempting to clear display flags or queue buffers. This results in an asynchronous SError (System Error) interrupt on ARM64 platforms, leading to a kernel panic. The fix involves properly wrapping hardware access calls with pm_runtime_resume_and_get() and pm_runtime_put_autosuspend() to ensure the hardware remains powered during critical operations.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 6.13 to 6.18.16, 6.19 to 6.19.6
Timeline
- 2026-05-06: disclosed
- 2026-05-06: advisory
- 2026-03-04: patched