Executive brief
A vulnerability was identified in the Linux kernel's AMD XDNA accelerator driver. This flaw causes a memory management reference leak, which over time could lead to system instability or resource exhaustion. This affects systems using specific AMD hardware accelerators, potentially impacting the reliability of operations relying on those devices.
Technical details
A reference leak exists in the 'accel/amdxdna' driver within the 'aie2_populate_range()' function in 'drivers/accel/amdxdna/aie2_ctx.c'. The function fails to call 'mmput(mm)' when jumping back to the 'again' label during retry scenarios (such as when encountering -EBUSY or MMU interval read retries). This results in a 'mm_struct' reference leak. An attacker with local access could potentially exploit this to cause a denial-of-service through memory resource exhaustion. The issue has been patched in various stable branches including 6.18.36 and 7.0.13.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 6.16 to 6.18.35, 7.0 to 7.0.12
Timeline
- 2026-07-19: disclosed
- 2026-07-19: advisory