CVE-2026-93830

Summary

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.

Affected Software

Weaknesses

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0b1a5d3647ce07c27a9fffefc11a8cbf7d7b25ce
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/87e2826ed2058747ddf014c082569a46bfadd96b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d3265c19b35d036bba327b36b5366bee76b0157c

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