In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xhci: fix lost bounce buffers on TDs spanning several ring segments When a TD reaches a link TRB with data that is not aligned to the endpoint's wMaxPacketSize, xhci_a…

Overview

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

xhci: fix lost bounce buffers on TDs spanning several ring segments

When a TD reaches a link TRB with data that is not aligned to the endpoint's wMaxPacketSize, xhci_align_td() stages the unalignable tail through the bounce buffer of the ring segment holding that link TRB. xhci_unmap_td_bounce_buffer() later unmaps it and, for IN transfers, copies the data back into the URB's buffer.

The enqueue path records the segment that was bounced in td->bounce_seg, under the assumption that a TD never spans more than two ring segments. That assumption does not hold: a TD large enough to span three or more segments crosses several link TRBs and can be bounced at each of them. Only the last one survives in td->bounce_seg, so every earlier bounce buffer is neither copied back nor DMA unmapped.

The URB still completes with actual_length equal to the requested length and no error, so the transfer looks successful while a wMaxPacketSize sized hole in the destination buffer silently keeps its previous contents. It also leaks a DMA mapping per dropped bounce.

Any sufficiently large and fragmented bulk transfer can hit this. It was found with a USB mass storage device behind xHCI backing a dm-verity target with 512 byte hash blocks, where the stale data is detected rather than silently consumed. The device enumerates as SuperSpeed, so wMaxPacketSize is 1024, while dm-bufio issues one 512 byte bio per hash block. verity_prefetch_io() makes the block layer merge hundreds of them into a single request of up to 512 scatterlist entries of 512 bytes each. At 256 TRBs per ring segment such a TD spans three segments, and every segment boundary falls on an odd multiple of 512, i.e. unaligned to wMaxPacketSize. dm-bufio then caches a hash block holding stale data and dm-verity declares the metadata block corrupted:

device-mapper: verity: 8:2: metadata block 10850 is corrupted

A reproducer running this under qemu is available at https://github.com/baloo/xhci-verity

The bounce state (bounce_buf, bounce_dma, bounce_len, bounce_offs) already lives on the ring segment, so there is nothing extra to track. Keep recording the last bounced segment in td->bounce_seg and, on completion, walk the segments from td->start_seg up to it, unmapping every segment that still has a pending bounce.

Stopping at td->bounce_seg rather than td->end_seg matters: a bounce implies the TD continues past that segment's link TRB, so bounce_seg is always strictly before end_seg, and a later TD may already have started in end_seg and been bounced there. Walking that far would copy a foreign bounce buffer into this URB and unmap it twice. It also keeps the walk correct if a TD ever wraps the whole ring so that end_seg == start_seg.

[mn: Add ring->num_segs check to prevent unlikely infinite for loop.]

Remediation

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

Vendor advisories

• Red Hat VEX · Moderate · affected: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · no fix planned: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, … · updated 2026-10-05 · vex