Vulnerabilities > CVE-2025-21981 - Memory Leak vulnerability in Linux Kernel

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ice: fix memory leak in aRFS after reset Fix aRFS (accelerated Receive Flow Steering) structures memory leak by adding a checker to verify if aRFS memory is already allocated while configuring VSI. aRFS objects are allocated in two cases: - as part of VSI initialization (at probe), and - as part of reset handling However, VSI reconfiguration executed during reset involves memory allocation one more time, without prior releasing already allocated resources. This led to the memory leak with the following signature: [root@os-delivery ~]# cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak unreferenced object 0xff3c1ca7252e6000 (size 8192): comm "kworker/0:0", pid 8, jiffies 4296833052 hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace (crc 0): [<ffffffff991ec485>] __kmalloc_cache_noprof+0x275/0x340 [<ffffffffc0a6e06a>] ice_init_arfs+0x3a/0xe0 [ice] [<ffffffffc09f1027>] ice_vsi_cfg_def+0x607/0x850 [ice] [<ffffffffc09f244b>] ice_vsi_setup+0x5b/0x130 [ice] [<ffffffffc09c2131>] ice_init+0x1c1/0x460 [ice] [<ffffffffc09c64af>] ice_probe+0x2af/0x520 [ice] [<ffffffff994fbcd3>] local_pci_probe+0x43/0xa0 [<ffffffff98f07103>] work_for_cpu_fn+0x13/0x20 [<ffffffff98f0b6d9>] process_one_work+0x179/0x390 [<ffffffff98f0c1e9>] worker_thread+0x239/0x340 [<ffffffff98f14abc>] kthread+0xcc/0x100 [<ffffffff98e45a6d>] ret_from_fork+0x2d/0x50 [<ffffffff98e083ba>] ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30 ...

Vulnerable Configurations

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

• CWE-401 - Improper Release of Memory Before Removing Last Reference ('Memory Leak')

References