Executive brief
A memory management issue was identified in the Linux kernel's virtual graphics driver (virtio-gpu). This flaw could lead to a resource leak when the system encounters an error while waiting for graphics operations to complete. Over time, such leaks can degrade system performance or lead to instability in virtualized environments.
Technical details
A reference count leak exists in the virtio_gpu_dma_fence_wait() function within drivers/gpu/drm/virtio/virtgpu_submit.c. The dma_fence_unwrap_for_each() macro increments a reference count on the fence chain; however, the virtio-gpu implementation performed an early return upon a failure in virtio_gpu_do_fence_wait() without decrementing this count. This results in a dma_fence refcount leak. The issue has been resolved by adding a dma_fence_put() call before the early return to ensure proper resource cleanup.
Affected products
- Linux Linux 6.5 to 7.1
Timeline
- 2026-06-07: other: Patch submitted by Wentao Liang
- 2026-06-25: advisory: CVE-2026-53190 published by kernel.org and NVD
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3f26bb732cc136ab20176697c92f32c9c84cb125
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/73524e9f96a278b521f257a78a845c49eb522bc1
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8348567a6afb24e2c9cafe8a321162d0eebe1411
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/898bd0ccfed71651b881660c5d20ad73b5203174
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c0fffc874c264292e769f26194a2a5e66ce31810