Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's Power Management Controller (PMC) for NVIDIA Tegra platforms could cause system instability. When the system resumes from a suspended state, certain internal processes are handled in an unsafe manner, potentially leading to system crashes or kernel warnings. This affects the reliability of devices using Tegra chips during power state transitions.
Technical details
A vulnerability in the NVIDIA Tegra PMC driver (drivers/soc/tegra/pmc.c) stems from an unsafe call to generic_handle_irq() within a non-interrupt context during the syscore_resume path. Specifically, tegra186_pmc_wake_syscore_resume() attempts to process wake events in a context where calling generic_handle_irq() is considered unsafe, triggering kernel warnings and potential instability. This is particularly problematic on PREEMPT_RT kernels where IRQ work must be explicitly handled in hardirq context. The fix involves deferring the IRQ handling to an IRQ work queue using IRQ_WORK_INIT_HARD to ensure it executes in the correct context. Patches have been released for various stable kernel branches including 6.6.y and 6.19.y.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 6.2 to 6.19.6
Timeline
- 2026-05-08: disclosed: CVE published
- 2026-03-04: patched: Fix committed to stable kernel tree