CVE-2026-43087 pinctrl: mcp23s08: Disable all pin interrupts during probe
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

pinctrl: mcp23s08: Disable all pin interrupts during probe

A chip being probed may have the interrupt-on-change feature enabled on
some of its pins, for example after a reboot. This can cause the chip to
generate interrupts for pins that don't have a registered nested handler,
which leads to a kernel crash such as below:

[    7.928897] Unable to handle kernel read from unreadable memory at virtual address 00000000000000ac
[    7.932314] Mem abort info:
[    7.935081]   ESR = 0x0000000096000004
[    7.938808]   EC = 0x25: DABT (current EL), IL = 32 bits
[    7.944094]   SET = 0, FnV = 0
[    7.947127]   EA = 0, S1PTW = 0
[    7.950247]   FSC = 0x04: level 0 translation fault
[    7.955101] Data abort info:
[    7.957961]   ISV = 0, ISS = 0x00000004, ISS2 = 0x00000000
[    7.963421]   CM = 0, WnR = 0, TnD = 0, TagAccess = 0
[    7.968447]   GCS = 0, Overlay = 0, DirtyBit = 0, Xs = 0
[    7.973734] user pgtable: 4k pages, 48-bit VAs, pgdp=00000000089b7000
[    7.980148] [00000000000000ac] pgd=0000000000000000, p4d=0000000000000000
[    7.986913] Internal error: Oops: 0000000096000004 [#1]  SMP
[    7.992545] Modules linked in:
[    8.073678] CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 81 Comm: irq/18-4-0025 Not tainted 7.0.0-rc6-gd2b5a1f931c8-dirty #199
[    8.073689] Hardware name: Khadas VIM3 (DT)
[    8.073692] pstate: 604000c5 (nZCv daIF +PAN -UAO -TCO -DIT -SSBS BTYPE=--)
[    8.094639] pc : _raw_spin_lock_irq+0x40/0x80
[    8.098970] lr : handle_nested_irq+0x2c/0x168
[    8.098979] sp : ffff800082b2bd20
[    8.106599] x29: ffff800082b2bd20 x28: ffff800080107920 x27: ffff800080104d88
[    8.106611] x26: ffff000003298080 x25: 0000000000000001 x24: 000000000000ff00
[    8.113707] x23: 0000000000000001 x22: 0000000000000000 x21: 000000000000000e
[    8.120850] x20: 0000000000000000 x19: 00000000000000ac x18: 0000000000000000
[    8.135046] x17: 0000000000000000 x16: 0000000000000000 x15: 0000000000000000
[    8.135062] x14: ffff800081567ea8 x13: ffffffffffffffff x12: 0000000000000000
[    8.135070] x11: 00000000000000c0 x10: 0000000000000b60 x9 : ffff800080109e0c
[    8.135078] x8 : 1fffe0000069dbc1 x7 : 0000000000000001 x6 : ffff0000034ede00
[    8.135086] x5 : 0000000000000000 x4 : ffff0000034ede08 x3 : 0000000000000001
[    8.163460] x2 : 0000000000000000 x1 : 0000000000000001 x0 : 00000000000000ac
[    8.170560] Call trace:
[    8.180094]  _raw_spin_lock_irq+0x40/0x80 (P)
[    8.184443]  mcp23s08_irq+0x248/0x358
[    8.184462]  irq_thread_fn+0x34/0xb8
[    8.184470]  irq_thread+0x1a4/0x310
[    8.195093]  kthread+0x13c/0x150
[    8.198309]  ret_from_fork+0x10/0x20
[    8.201850] Code: d65f03c0 d2800002 52800023 f9800011 (885ffc01)
[    8.207931] ---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---

This issue has always been present, but has been latent until commit
"f9f4fda15e72" ("pinctrl: mcp23s08: init reg_defaults from HW at probe and
switch cache type"), which correctly removed reg_defaults from the regmap
and as a side effect changed the behavior of the interrupt handler so that
the real value of the MCP_GPINTEN register is now being read from the chip
instead of using a bogus 0 default value; a non-zero value for this
register can trigger the invocation of a nested handler which may not exist
(yet).
Fix this issue by disabling all pin interrupts during initialization.
Affected products: vendor: Linux
product: Linux
default_status: unaffected
vendor: Linux
product: Linux
default_status: affected
Published: 2026-05-06T07:40:21.303Z