In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: ks8851: Fix deadlock with the SPI chip variant When SMP is enabled and spinlocks are actually functional then there is a deadlock with the 'statelock' spinlock between ks8851_start_xmit_spi and ks8851_irq: watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 27s! call trace: queued_spin_lock_slowpath+0x100/0x284 do_raw_spin_lock+0x34/0x44 ks8851_start_xmit_spi+0x30/0xb8 ks8851_start_xmit+0x14/0x20 netdev_start_xmit+0x40/0x6c dev_hard_start_xmit+0x6c/0xbc sch_direct_xmit+0xa4/0x22c __qdisc_run+0x138/0x3fc qdisc_run+0x24/0x3c net_tx_action+0xf8/0x130 handle_softirqs+0x1ac/0x1f0 __do_softirq+0x14/0x20 ____do_softirq+0x10/0x1c call_on_irq_stack+0x3c/0x58 do_softirq_own_stack+0x1c/0x28 __irq_exit_rcu+0x54/0x9c irq_exit_rcu+0x10/0x1c el1_interrupt+0x38/0x50 el1h_64_irq_handler+0x18/0x24 el1h_64_irq+0x64/0x68 __netif_schedule+0x6c/0x80 netif_tx_wake_queue+0x38/0x48 ks8851_irq+0xb8/0x2c8 irq_thread_fn+0x2c/0x74 irq_thread+0x10c/0x1b0 kthread+0xc8/0xd8 ret_from_fork+0x10/0x20 This issue has not been identified earlier because tests were done on a device with SMP disabled and so spinlocks were actually NOPs. Now use spin_(un)lock_bh for TX queue related locking to avoid execution of softirq work synchronously that would lead to a deadlock.
The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.