In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: idpf: fix idpf_vc_core_init error path In an event where the platform running the device control plane is rebooted, reset is detected on the driver. It releases all the resources and waits for the reset to complete. Once the reset is done, it tries to build the resources back. At this time if the device control plane is not yet started, then the driver timeouts on the virtchnl message and retries to establish the mailbox again. In the retry flow, mailbox is deinitialized but the mailbox workqueue is still alive and polling for the mailbox message. This results in accessing the released control queue leading to null-ptr-deref. Fix it by unrolling the work queue cancellation and mailbox deinitialization in the reverse order which they got initialized.
The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.