Affected: Linux

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

arm64: Restrict CPU_BIG_ENDIAN to GNU as or LLVM IAS 15.x or newer

Prior to LLVM 15.0.0, LLVM's integrated assembler would incorrectly byte-swap NOP when compiling for big-endian, and the resulting series of bytes happened to match the encoding of FNMADD S21, S30, S0, S0.

This went unnoticed until commit:

34f66c4c4d5518c1 ("arm64: Use a positive cpucap for FP/SIMD")

Prior to that commit, the kernel would always enable the use of FPSIMD early in boot when __cpu_setup() initialized CPACR_EL1, and so usage of FNMADD within the kernel was not detected, but could result in the corruption of user or kernel FPSIMD state.

After that commit, the instructions happen to trap during boot prior to FPSIMD being detected and enabled, e.g.

| Unhandled 64-bit el1h sync exception on CPU0, ESR 0x000000001fe00000 -- ASIMD | CPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Not tainted 6.6.0-rc3-00013-g34f66c4c4d55 #1 | Hardware name: linux,dummy-virt (DT) | pstate: 400000c9 (nZcv daIF -PAN -UAO -TCO -DIT -SSBS BTYPE=--) | pc : __pi_strcmp+0x1c/0x150 | lr : populate_properties+0xe4/0x254 | sp : ffffd014173d3ad0 | x29: ffffd014173d3af0 x28: fffffbfffddffcb8 x27: 0000000000000000 | x26: 0000000000000058 x25: fffffbfffddfe054 x24: 0000000000000008 | x23: fffffbfffddfe000 x22: fffffbfffddfe000 x21: fffffbfffddfe044 | x20: ffffd014173d3b70 x19: 0000000000000001 x18: 0000000000000005 | x17: 0000000000000010 x16: 0000000000000000 x15: 00000000413e7…