Findings

CVE-2023-53087

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/i915/active: Fix misuse of non-idle barriers as fence trackers Users reported oopses on list co…

Published May 2, 2025 · updated Oct 15, 2026 · linux linux kernel

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/i915/active: Fix misuse of non-idle barriers as fence trackers Users reported oopses on list corruptions when using i915 perf with a number of concurrently running graphics applications. Root cause analysis pointed at an issue in barrier processing code -- a race among perf open / close replacing active barriers with perf requests on kernel context and concurrent barrier preallocate / acquire operations performed during user context first pin / last unpin. When adding a request to a composite tracker, we try to reuse an existing fence tracker, already allocated and registered with that composite. The tracker we obtain may already track another fence, may be an idle barrier, or an active barrier. If the tracker we get occurs a non-idle barrier then we try to delete that barrier from a list of barrier tasks it belongs to. However, while doing that we don't respect return value from a function that performs the barrier deletion. Should the deletion ever fail, we would end up reusing the tracker still registered as a barrier task. Since the same structure field is reused with both fence callback lists and barrier tasks list, list corruptions would likely occur. Barriers are now deleted from a barrier tasks list by temporarily removing the list content, traversing that content with skip over the node to be deleted, then populating the list back with the modified content. Should that intentionally racy concurrent deletion attempts be not serialized, one or more of those may fail because of the list being temporary empty. Related code that ignores the results of barrier deletion was initially introduced in v5.4 by commit d8af05ff38ae ("drm/i915: Allow sharing the idle-barrier from other kernel requests"). However, all users of the barrier deletion routine were apparently serialized at that time, then the issue didn't exhibit itself. Results of git bisect with help of a newly developed igt@gem_barrier_r