CVE-2026-97537

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's qla2xxx driver. A local user could cause a Denial of Service (DoS) through a system crash during device queue teardown. This issue occurs when error handling paths fail to properly synchronize queue state and attempt to deallocate memory pointers that were never initialized.

A Moderate-impact flaw was found in the Linux kernel's qla2xxx Fibre Channel driver as shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and RHEL CoreOS-based products. Two defects in the queue teardown error path can cause a local denial of service: when a DMA allocation fails during request/response queue creation, the error path unconditionally calls dma_free_coherent() on a still-NULL ring pointer, which is undefined behavior and can panic the kernel; and the queue creation and destruction paths protect the shared queue-ID bitmaps with different locks (mq_lock and vport_lock), so a race can clear another thread's newly installed queue map entry and leave the adapter in an inconsistent state. A local user able to trigger queue creation failure or concurrent queue create/teardown operations on a qla2xxx adapter could use this to crash the system or disrupt I/O. There is no impact to confidentiality or integrity. Red Hat assigned a CVSS 3.1 base score of 5.5 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H). The kernel and kernel-rt packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9, and 10, Red Hat In-Vehicle OS, and the OpenShift Container Platform streams based on RHCOS 8 and RHCOS 9 are affected; RHEL 6 Extended Lifecycle Support is out of support scope and is not receiving a fix. Because the flaw only affects availability, requires local access, and depends on low-probability error or race conditions, fixes are deferred to a future scheduled update of the affected products rather than an urgent update; the residual risk is limited to a local denial of service on systems using affected qla2xxx hardware.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.