In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: stmmac: xgmac2: disable RBUE in default RX interrupt mask Enabling the RX Buffer Unavailable (RBUE) interrupt is counterproductive and can trigger a MAC interrupt…

Overview

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

net: stmmac: xgmac2: disable RBUE in default RX interrupt mask

Enabling the RX Buffer Unavailable (RBUE) interrupt is counterproductive and can trigger a MAC interrupt storm under heavy RX pressure. When the DMA runs out of RX descriptors it fires RBUE continuously until software refills the ring.

However, RBUE is redundant: the normal RX completion interrupt (RIE) already triggers NAPI, which processes completed descriptors and refills the ring, causing the DMA to resume. The RBUE handler itself only sets handle_rx - the same outcome as RIE.

On Agilex5 under heavy RX pressure, the MAC interrupt (which includes RBUE) was observed firing 1,821,811,555 times against only 2,618,627 actual RX completions - a ~695x ratio - confirming the severity of the storm.

RBUE does not provide OOM recovery. If page_pool is exhausted, stmmac_rx_refill() cannot advance the DMA tail pointer, the DMA stays suspended, and RBUE fires again on the next NAPI completion - a storm with no forward progress. This patch trades that storm for a clean stall with the same RX outcome. Proper OOM recovery is a pre-existing gap outside the scope of this fix.

Note: as a consequence of disabling RBUE, the rx_buf_unav_irq ethtool counter will always read 0 on XGMAC2 devices. This behaviour is already inconsistent across DWMAC core versions.

Remove RBUE from XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_EN and XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_RX to prevent the interrupt storm while keeping normal RX handling intact.

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 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · no fix planned: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · updated 2026-10-17 · vex