Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's networking subsystem could cause the system to stop responding (deadlock) when administrators attempt to view network interface information. This occurs specifically on systems using Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA) to manage network switches. An exploit of this flaw would result in a denial of service, requiring a system reboot to restore operations.
Technical details
A deadlock vulnerability exists in the Linux kernel's net/dsa/conduit.c component. The Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA) subsystem replaces a conduit (master) device's ethtool_ops with wrappers that aggregate statistics. These wrappers incorrectly attempted to acquire the netdev instance lock (netdev_lock_ops) while it was already held by the ethtool core, leading to a recursive deadlock. The issue can be triggered by local users executing commands like 'ethtool -i' on affected configurations. The vulnerability has been resolved by removing the redundant locking calls in the DSA conduit ethtool wrappers.
Affected products
- Linux Linux 6.15 to 6.18.32, 7.0.9
Timeline
- 2026-04-14: patched: Initial patch authored by Stanislav Fomichev
- 2026-06-26: advisory: CVE-2026-53323 published by NVD