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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published May 20, 2024· Updated May 4, 2025

virtio_net: Do not send RSS key if it is not supported

CVE-2024-35981

Description

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

virtio_net: Do not send RSS key if it is not supported

There is a bug when setting the RSS options in virtio_net that can break the whole machine, getting the kernel into an infinite loop.

Running the following command in any QEMU virtual machine with virtionet will reproduce this problem:

# ethtool -X eth0 hfunc toeplitz

This is how the problem happens:

1) ethtool_set_rxfh() calls virtnet_set_rxfh()

2) virtnet_set_rxfh() calls virtnet_commit_rss_command()

3) virtnet_commit_rss_command() populates 4 entries for the rss scatter-gather

4) Since the command above does not have a key, then the last scatter-gatter entry will be zeroed, since rss_key_size == 0. sg_buf_size = vi->rss_key_size;

5) This buffer is passed to qemu, but qemu is not happy with a buffer with zero length, and do the following in virtqueue_map_desc() (QEMU function):

if (!sz) { virtio_error(vdev, "virtio: zero sized buffers are not allowed");

6) virtio_error() (also QEMU function) set the device as broken

vdev->broken = true;

7) Qemu bails out, and do not repond this crazy kernel.

8) The kernel is waiting for the response to come back (function virtnet_send_command())

9) The kernel is waiting doing the following :

while (!virtqueue_get_buf(vi->cvq, &tmp) && !virtqueue_is_broken(vi->cvq)) cpu_relax();

10) None of the following functions above is true, thus, the kernel loops here forever. Keeping in mind that virtqueue_is_broken() does not look at the qemu vdev->broken, so, it never realizes that the vitio is broken at QEMU side.

Fix it by not sending RSS commands if the feature is not available in the device.

Affected products

48

Patches

0

No patches discovered yet.

Vulnerability mechanics

AI mechanics synthesis has not run for this CVE yet.

References

4

News mentions

0

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