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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38673 json

Revert "drm/gem-framebuffer: Use dma_buf from GEM object instance"

published 2025-08-22 14 mo ago modified 2026-11-05 3 d ago also EUVD-2025-25528

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 2%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

Revert "drm/gem-framebuffer: Use dma_buf from GEM object instance"

This reverts commit cce16fcd7446dcff7480cd9d2b6417075ed81065.

The dma_buf field in struct drm_gem_object is not stable over the object instance's lifetime. The field becomes NULL when user space releases the final GEM handle on the buffer object. This resulted in a NULL-pointer deref.

Workarounds in commit 5307dce878d4 ("drm/gem: Acquire references on GEM handles for framebuffers") and commit f6bfc9afc751 ("drm/framebuffer: Acquire internal references on GEM handles") only solved the problem partially. They especially don't work for buffer objects without a DRM framebuffer associated.

Hence, this revert to going back to using .import_attach->dmabuf.

v3: - cc stable

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.15.9, 6.16

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-38673 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: Revert "drm/gem-framebuffer: Use dma_buf from GEM object instance"

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: workaround, no fix available “To mitigate this issue, prevent module drm from being loaded. Please see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278 for how to blacklist a kernel module to prevent it from loading automatically.”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
3 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 2% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.