Executive brief
The Linux kernel's panel-edp display driver contains a resource leak where I2C adapter references are not properly released when probe operations fail (such as during probe deferral) or when the driver is unbound. This can gradually exhaust system resources and lead to memory pressure or device unavailability over time.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a reference-counting bug in the drm/panel-edp driver. When the i2c adapter is obtained via the device tree 'ddc-i2c-bus' property, the driver fails to release the adapter reference on probe failure (including probe deferral) and on driver unbind. The fix introduces a devm-managed cleanup handler (panel_edp_put_adapter) using devm_add_action_or_reset() to ensure the reference is dropped automatically. The issue affects kernel versions from 5.15 onward, where the DP AUX bus DDC code was introduced. No active exploitation in the wild is reported.
Affected products
- Linux Linux kernel 5.15 and later
Timeline
- 2026-09-16: disclosed: CVE-2026-89824 published
- 2026-09-11: patched: Fix committed to stable kernel tree