Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

serial: amba-pl011: avoid SBSA UART accessing DMACR register

Chapter "B Generic UART" in "ARM Server Base System Architecture" [1] documentation describes a generic UART interface. Such generic UART does not support DMA. In current code, sbsa_uart_pops and amba_pl011_pops share the same stop_rx operation, which will invoke pl011_dma_rx_stop, leading to an access of the DMACR register. This commit adds a using_rx_dma check in pl011_dma_rx_stop to avoid the access to DMACR register for SBSA UARTs which does not support DMA.

When the kernel enables DMA engine with "CONFIG_DMA_ENGINE=y", Linux SBSA PL011 driver will access PL011 DMACR register in some functions. For most real SBSA Pl011 hardware implementations, the DMACR write behaviour will be ignored. So these DMACR operations will not cause obvious problems. But for some virtual SBSA PL011 hardware, like Xen virtual SBSA PL011 (vpl011) device, the behaviour might be different. Xen vpl011 emulation will inject a data abort to guest, when guest is accessing an unimplemented UART register. As Xen VPL011 is SBSA compatible, it will not implement DMACR register. So when Linux SBSA PL011 driver access DMACR register, it will get an unhandled data abort fault and the application will get a segmentation fault: Unhandled fault at 0xffffffc00944d048 Mem abort info: ESR = 0x96000000 EC = 0x25: DABT (current EL), IL = 32 bits SET = 0, FnV = 0 EA = 0, S1PTW =…