CVE-2026-97962

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's mlx5 network driver. The driver fails to hold the required lock when destroying virtual network interface health reporters during device unloading. A local user with administrative privileges could trigger this flaw by unbinding the driver, resulting in a kernel assertion failure that may cause system instability or a Denial of Service (DoS).

A moderate-impact flaw exists in the Linux kernel mlx5 network driver as shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9, and 10, Red Hat In-Vehicle OS 2, and the RHEL CoreOS 9 kernel used by OpenShift Container Platform 4. The mlx5e representor vnic devlink health reporter is created and destroyed along the representor netdev (un)load path, which is not serialized by the devlink instance lock. Consequently, when a local user with administrative privileges unbinds the mlx5 driver, destruction of the health reporter triggers a kernel assertion failure (a devl_assert_locked() WARNING). This kernel warning may cause system instability or a denial of service, particularly on systems where panic_on_warn is enabled. Confidentiality and integrity are not impacted; Red Hat rates this flaw Moderate severity (CVSS 3.1 score 5.5, AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H). Fixes for the affected streams are currently deferred to a future routine update because the issue manifests as a kernel warning that requires privileged local access to trigger and affects only availability, so it does not warrant an immediate out-of-band kernel update; the residual risk is limited to local denial of service on hosts where an administrative user unbinds the mlx5 driver. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the RHEL 8.4, 8.6, and 8.8 update streams, the RHEL 9.2 update stream, and OpenShift Container Platform versions built on RHEL CoreOS 8 are not affected because the vulnerable code, the mlx5e representor vnic devlink health reporter, is not present in those versions.

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.