Affected: Linux

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

scsi: storvsc: Fix handling of virtual Fibre Channel timeouts

Hyper-V provides the ability to connect Fibre Channel LUNs to the host system and present them in a guest VM as a SCSI device. I/O to the vFC device is handled by the storvsc driver. The storvsc driver includes a partial integration with the FC transport implemented in the generic portion of the Linux SCSI subsystem so that FC attributes can be displayed in /sys. However, the partial integration means that some aspects of vFC don't work properly. Unfortunately, a full and correct integration isn't practical because of limitations in what Hyper-V provides to the guest.

In particular, in the context of Hyper-V storvsc, the FC transport timeout function fc_eh_timed_out() causes a kernel panic because it can't find the rport and dereferences a NULL pointer. The original patch that added the call from storvsc_eh_timed_out() to fc_eh_timed_out() is faulty in this regard.

In many cases a timeout is due to a transient condition, so the situation can be improved by just continuing to wait like with other I/O requests issued by storvsc, and avoiding the guaranteed panic. For a permanent failure, continuing to wait may result in a hung thread instead of a panic, which again may be better.

So fix the panic by removing the storvsc call to fc_eh_timed_out(). This allows storvsc to keep waiting for a response. The change has been tested by users who expe…