Affected: Linux

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

net: dsa: seville: register the mdiobus under devres

As explained in commits: 74b6d7d13307 ("net: dsa: realtek: register the MDIO bus under devres") 5135e96a3dd2 ("net: dsa: don't allocate the slave_mii_bus using devres")

mdiobus_free() will panic when called from devm_mdiobus_free() <- devres_release_all() <- __device_release_driver(), and that mdiobus was not previously unregistered.

The Seville VSC9959 switch is a platform device, so the initial set of constraints that I thought would cause this (I2C or SPI buses which call ->remove on ->shutdown) do not apply. But there is one more which applies here.

If the DSA master itself is on a bus that calls ->remove from ->shutdown (like dpaa2-eth, which is on the fsl-mc bus), there is a device link between the switch and the DSA master, and device_links_unbind_consumers() will unbind the seville switch driver on shutdown.

So the same treatment must be applied to all DSA switch drivers, which is: either use devres for both the mdiobus allocation and registration, or don't use devres at all.

The seville driver has a code structure that could accommodate both the mdiobus_unregister and mdiobus_free calls, but it has an external dependency upon mscc_miim_setup() from mdio-mscc-miim.c, which calls devm_mdiobus_alloc_size() on its behalf. So rather than restructuring that, and exporting yet one more symbol mscc_miim_teardown(), let's work with devres and replac…