Executive brief
The ice1712 audio driver in the Linux kernel failed to properly release sound card resources when device initialization failed during driver probe. This caused memory and resource leaks on systems with ice1712 audio hardware that encountered initialization errors, potentially degrading system stability over time if hardware failures or incompatibilities occurred.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a resource leak in the snd_ice1712_probe() function where ALSA sound card structures allocated via snd_card_new() were not released when later initialization steps failed. The probe function performed multiple setup operations after card creation but would return directly on error without calling the cleanup function, leaving allocated memory and resources orphaned. The fix replaces snd_card_new() with snd_devm_card_new() (device-managed allocation) and adds scope-based cleanup via __free(snd_card_unref), ensuring automatic resource release on probe failure. The card pointer is cleared on successful probe to prevent the cleanup handler from releasing it prematurely.
Affected products
- Linux Linux kernel affected versions across kernel series from 2.6.11 through 7.2
Timeline
- 2026-09-17: disclosed: CVE-2026-90119 published
- 2026-08-20: patched: Upstream commit d736eba9c453fedce664fdf592c8b71ecff1932b authored
- 2026-09-14: patched: Stable kernel patches committed