In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: parisc: Avoid crash due to unaligned access in unwinder Guenter Roeck reported this kernel crash on his emulated B160L machine: Starting network: udhcpc: started, v1.…

Overview

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

parisc: Avoid crash due to unaligned access in unwinder

Guenter Roeck reported this kernel crash on his emulated B160L machine:

Starting network: udhcpc: started, v1.36.1 Backtrace: [<104320d4>] unwind_once+0x1c/0x5c [<10434a00>] walk_stackframe.isra.0+0x74/0xb8 [<10434a6c>] arch_stack_walk+0x28/0x38 [<104e5efc>] stack_trace_save+0x48/0x5c [<105d1bdc>] set_track_prepare+0x44/0x6c [<105d9c80>] ___slab_alloc+0xfc4/0x1024 [<105d9d38>] __slab_alloc.isra.0+0x58/0x90 [<105dc80c>] kmem_cache_alloc_noprof+0x2ac/0x4a0 [<105b8e54>] __anon_vma_prepare+0x60/0x280 [<105a823c>] __vmf_anon_prepare+0x68/0x94 [<105a8b34>] do_wp_page+0x8cc/0xf10 [<105aad88>] handle_mm_fault+0x6c0/0xf08 [<10425568>] do_page_fault+0x110/0x440 [<10427938>] handle_interruption+0x184/0x748 [<11178398>] schedule+0x4c/0x190 BUG: spinlock recursion on CPU#0, ifconfig/2420 lock: terminate_lock.2+0x0/0x1c, .magic: dead4ead, .owner: ifconfig/2420, .owner_cpu: 0

While creating the stack trace, the unwinder uses the stack pointer to guess the previous frame to read the previous stack pointer from memory. The crash happens, because the unwinder tries to read from unaligned memory and as such triggers the unalignment trap handler which then leads to the spinlock recursion and finally to a deadlock.

Fix it by checking the alignment before accessing the memory.

Remediation

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