Executive brief
A technical issue was identified in the Linux kernel's support for certain MediaTek processors used in embedded devices. The system was incorrectly marking certain hardware control data as temporary, causing it to be deleted after the system started even though it was still needed. This could lead to system instability or crashes when the hardware attempts to access that deleted information during normal operation.
Technical details
A vulnerability in the MediaTek clock drivers (specifically clk-mt7981-eth and clk-mt8516) was caused by the improper use of the __initconst annotation on mtk_gate structs. Following a refactor in commit 8ceff24a754a, these structures were transitioned from being used only during initialization to being required at runtime. Because they were marked with __initconst, the memory containing these structs would be freed after the kernel initialization phase, leading to potential kernel panics or undefined behavior when the clock framework attempted to access them later. The fix involves removing the __initconst attribute to ensure the structures remain resident in memory.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel MT7981 and MT8516 MediaTek clock drivers
Timeline
- 2025-12-23: other: Patch authored
- 2026-01-22: patched: Patch committed to mainline kernel
- 2026-05-27: advisory: CVE published