Use After Free Affecting kernel-default package, versions <6.12.0-160000.6.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.02% (4th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES1600-KERNELDEFAULT-13937989
  • published13 Nov 2025
  • disclosed6 Nov 2025

Introduced: 6 Nov 2025

CVE-2025-38703  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-416  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:16.0.0 kernel-default to version 6.12.0-160000.6.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-default package and not the kernel-default package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:16.0.0 relevant fixed versions and status.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

drm/xe: Make dma-fences compliant with the safe access rules

Xe can free some of the data pointed to by the dma-fences it exports. Most notably the timeline name can get freed if userspace closes the associated submit queue. At the same time the fence could have been exported to a third party (for example a sync_fence fd) which will then cause an use- after-free on subsequent access.

To make this safe we need to make the driver compliant with the newly documented dma-fence rules. Driver has to ensure a RCU grace period between signalling a fence and freeing any data pointed to by said fence.

For the timeline name we simply make the queue be freed via kfree_rcu and for the shared lock associated with multiple queues we add a RCU grace period before freeing the per GT structure holding the lock.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1