CVE-2025-71152 net: dsa: properly keep track of conduit reference
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: dsa: properly keep track of conduit reference

Problem description
-------------------

DSA has a mumbo-jumbo of reference handling of the conduit net device
and its kobject which, sadly, is just wrong and doesn't make sense.

There are two distinct problems.

1. The OF path, which uses of_find_net_device_by_node(), never releases
   the elevated refcount on the conduit's kobject. Nominally, the OF and
   non-OF paths should result in objects having identical reference
   counts taken, and it is already suspicious that
   dsa_dev_to_net_device() has a put_device() call which is missing in
   dsa_port_parse_of(), but we can actually even verify that an issue
   exists. With CONFIG_DEBUG_KOBJECT_RELEASE=y, if we run this command
   "before" and "after" applying this patch:

(unbind the conduit driver for net device eno2)
echo 0000:00:00.2 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/fsl_enetc/unbind

we see these lines in the output diff which appear only with the patch
applied:

kobject: 'eno2' (ffff002009a3a6b8): kobject_release, parent 0000000000000000 (delayed 1000)
kobject: '109' (ffff0020099d59a0): kobject_release, parent 0000000000000000 (delayed 1000)

2. After we find the conduit interface one way (OF) or another (non-OF),
   it can get unregistered at any time, and DSA remains with a long-lived,
   but in this case stale, cpu_dp->conduit pointer. Holding the net
   device's underlying kobject isn't actually of much help, it just
   prevents it from being freed (but we never need that kobject
   directly). What helps us to prevent the net device from being
   unregistered is the parallel netdev reference mechanism (dev_hold()
   and dev_put()).

Actually we actually use that netdev tracker mechanism implicitly on
user ports since commit 2f1e8ea726e9 ("net: dsa: link interfaces with
the DSA master to get rid of lockdep warnings"), via netdev_upper_dev_link().
But time still passes at DSA switch probe time between the initial
of_find_net_device_by_node() code and the user port creation time, time
during which the conduit could unregister itself and DSA wouldn't know
about it.

So we have to run of_find_net_device_by_node() under rtnl_lock() to
prevent that from happening, and release the lock only with the netdev
tracker having acquired the reference.

Do we need to keep the reference until dsa_unregister_switch() /
dsa_switch_shutdown()?
1: Maybe yes. A switch device will still be registered even if all user
   ports failed to probe, see commit 86f8b1c01a0a ("net: dsa: Do not
   make user port errors fatal"), and the cpu_dp->conduit pointers
   remain valid.  I haven't audited all call paths to see whether they
   will actually use the conduit in lack of any user port, but if they
   do, it seems safer to not rely on user ports for that reference.
2. Definitely yes. We support changing the conduit which a user port is
   associated to, and we can get into a situation where we've moved all
   user ports away from a conduit, thus no longer hold any reference to
   it via the net device tracker. But we shouldn't let it go nonetheless
   - see the next change in relation to dsa_tree_find_first_conduit()
   and LAG conduits which disappear.
   We have to be prepared to return to the physical conduit, so the CPU
   port must explicitly keep another reference to it. This is also to
   say: the user ports and their CPU ports may not always keep a
   reference to the same conduit net device, and both are needed.

As for the conduit's kobject for the /sys/class/net/ entry, we don't
care about it, we can release it as soon as we hold the net device
object itself.

History and blame attribution
-----------------------------

The code has been refactored so many times, it is very difficult to
follow and properly attribute a blame, but I'll try to make a short
history which I hope to be correct.

We have two distinct probing paths:
- one for OF, introduced in 2016 i
---truncated---
Affected products: vendor: Linux
product: Linux
default_status: unaffected
vendor: Linux
product: Linux
default_status: affected
Published: 2026-01-23T14:25:52.022Z