Impact
This vulnerability is a race condition in the NVMe PCI driver that can cause the kernel to enable an interrupt it never disabled. When an NVMe device is reset while an interrupt is being processed, the code may enable a stale IRQ number, leading to an unbalanced enable/disable pair and a kernel warning or crash. The flaw is a classic concurrency bug that directly affects the stability and reliability of the operating system.
Affected Systems
Any system running a Linux kernel that contains the buggy nvme_poll_irqdisable implementation before the patch is potentially affected. The code change applies to all kernel releases that include the NVMe PCI subsystem before the fix. This includes recent mainstream releases such as 6.19 and earlier versions still in use.
Risk and Exploitability
The CVSS score of 5.5 indicates moderate severity, while the EPSS score of less than 1% shows a very low probability of exploitation. The description shows that the race condition requires concurrent NVMe reset and interrupt handling, which suggests it is a local or privileged race condition. Because the flaw is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalog, there are currently no known field‑deployed exploits. Nonetheless, an attacker with local or kernel‑level privileges could trigger a denial‑of‑service by provoking the race and causing a kernel crash.
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