The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a deadlock. This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking discipline work. In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the feature. Note that even with the feature disabled, the lock would still be acquired for any accesses to the VGA MMIO region.
History

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 19:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Weaknesses CWE-667
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 6.5, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N'}

ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:45:00 +0000


Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a deadlock. This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking discipline work. In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the feature. Note that even with the feature disabled, the lock would still be acquired for any accesses to the VGA MMIO region.
Title Deadlock in x86 HVM standard VGA handling
References

cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: XEN

Published: 2024-12-19T12:00:41.413Z

Updated: 2024-12-31T19:01:43.510Z

Reserved: 2024-09-09T14:43:11.826Z

Link: CVE-2024-45818

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2024-12-19T12:04:41.161Z

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2024-12-19T12:15:16.540

Modified: 2024-12-31T19:15:46.603

Link: CVE-2024-45818

cve-icon Redhat

No data.