In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: s390/vfio_ccw: Selectively expand io_mutex The io_mutex was defined to serialize the io_regions, but then has also sort of been associated with the I/O themselves beca…

Overview

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

s390/vfio_ccw: Selectively expand io_mutex

The io_mutex was defined to serialize the io_regions, but then has also sort of been associated with the I/O themselves because of the close relationship they share.

With the handful of races that are possible, the choices are either to: A) expand the scope of io_mutex to close these remaining windows, or B) reduce the scope of io_mutex to just io_region, and introduce a new lock mechanism for the remaining I/O resources

This patch implements A, since B brings with it a lot more interactions that would need to be tracked and kept in a correct hierarchy. It also takes advantage of the workqueue element for cp_free() that now gets called out of fsm_notoper(), which could be invoked out of an interrupt context and thus cannot acquire a mutex itself.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.