The vulnerability is a Use‑After‑Free flaw in the dmaengine idxd device driver where failure paths in idxd_cdev_open() drop the file‑device reference while holding a workqueue lock. This causes the release routine to try to reacquire the same lock, resulting in a deadlock, and it can also trigger a use‑after‑free of the driver context during cleanup, potentially operating on freed memory. These race conditions can stall system processes or trigger a kernel panic, effectively denying service to the affected system.

All Linux kernel releases that contain the dmaengine idxd driver are affected until the patch that moves wq acquisition before error handling is applied. The precise impacted versions are not listed in the CVE data.

The likely attack vector is a local or privileged user‑space process that opens or interacts with the idxd device, implying local or privileged exploitation. The EPSS score is <1% and the vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. With a CVSS score of 7.8, it poses a high‑severity risk. The primary impact is a denial of service through kernel deadlock or memory corruption, and if the use‑after‑free is successfully leveraged, it could lead to arbitrary kernel code execution.