CVE-2025-21681 — openvswitch: fix lockup on tx to unregistering netdev with carrier

Affected: Linux

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

openvswitch: fix lockup on tx to unregistering netdev with carrier

Commit in a fixes tag attempted to fix the issue in the following sequence of calls:

do_output -> ovs_vport_send -> dev_queue_xmit -> __dev_queue_xmit -> netdev_core_pick_tx -> skb_tx_hash

When device is unregistering, the 'dev->real_num_tx_queues' goes to zero and the 'while (unlikely(hash >= qcount))' loop inside the 'skb_tx_hash' becomes infinite, locking up the core forever.

But unfortunately, checking just the carrier status is not enough to fix the issue, because some devices may still be in unregistering state while reporting carrier status OK.

One example of such device is a net/dummy. It sets carrier ON on start, but it doesn't implement .ndo_stop to set the carrier off. And it makes sense, because dummy doesn't really have a carrier. Therefore, while this device is unregistering, it's still easy to hit the infinite loop in the skb_tx_hash() from the OVS datapath. There might be other drivers that do the same, but dummy by itself is important for the OVS ecosystem, because it is frequently used as a packet sink for tcpdump while debugging OVS deployments. And when the issue is hit, the only way to recover is to reboot.

Fix that by also checking if the device is running. The running state is handled by the net core during unregistering, so it covers unregistering case be…

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CVE-2025-21681 — openvswitch: fix lockup on tx to unregistering netdev with carrier