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.
CVSS Details
- CVSS 3.1 Base Score: 6.5
- CVSS 3.1 Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N)
Covered by Rapid7
| Product | Vendor Advisory | Solution File | Added | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alpine Linux | — | Upgrade xen | Aug 8, 2025 | Dec 19, 2024 |
| Debian | — | Upgrade xen | Dec 30, 2024 | Dec 19, 2024 |
| Dell Powerstore Dsa2025223 | — | Upgrade Dell PowerStoreOS to the latest version | Oct 23, 2025 | May 27, 2025 |
| Dell Powerstore Dsa2025342 | — | Upgrade Dell PowerStoreOS to the latest version | Oct 23, 2025 | Sep 2, 2025 |
| Dell Powerstore Dsa2026039 | — | Upgrade Dell PowerStoreOS to the latest version | Jan 13, 2026 | Jan 6, 2026 |
| Suse | — | Upgrade xen-libs-32bitUpgrade xen-tools-domUUpgrade xen-develUpgrade xen-doc-htmlUpgrade xenUpgrade xen-toolsUpgrade xen-libsUpgrade xen-tools-xendomains-wait-disk | Dec 5, 2025 | Nov 12, 2024 |
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