CVE-2025-38669 – “Linux Kernel DRM GEM NULL Pointer Dereference Vulnerability”

The following table lists the changes that have been made to the
CVE-2025-38669 vulnerability over time.

Vulnerability history details can be useful for understanding the evolution
of a vulnerability, and for identifying the most recent changes that may
impact the vulnerability’s severity, exploitability, or other characteristics.

  • New CVE Received
    by 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67

    Aug. 22, 2025

    Action Type Old Value New Value
    Added Description In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

    Revert “drm/gem-shmem: Use dma_buf from GEM object instance”

    This reverts commit 1a148af06000e545e714fe3210af3d77ff903c11.

    The dma_buf field in struct drm_gem_object is not stable over the
    object instance’s lifetime. The field becomes NULL when user space
    releases the final GEM handle on the buffer object. This resulted
    in a NULL-pointer deref.

    Workarounds in commit 5307dce878d4 (“drm/gem: Acquire references on
    GEM handles for framebuffers”) and commit f6bfc9afc751 (“drm/framebuffer:
    Acquire internal references on GEM handles”) only solved the problem
    partially. They especially don’t work for buffer objects without a DRM
    framebuffer associated.

    Hence, this revert to going back to using .import_attach->dmabuf.

    v3:
    – cc stable

    Added Reference https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/291a77604858a8b47cf6640a12b76e97f99e00ed
    Added Reference https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6d496e9569983a0d7a05be6661126d0702cf94f7
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