CVE-2022-49272 - CVE House
Back to Database
Status published Medium CVE-2022-49272

ALSA: pcm: Fix potential AB/BA lock with buffer_mutex and mmap_lock

Vulnerability Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ALSA: pcm: Fix potential AB/BA lock with buffer_mutex and mmap_lock syzbot caught a potential deadlock between the PCM runtime->buffer_mutex and the mm->mmap_lock. It was brought by the recent fix to cover the racy read/write and other ioctls, and in that commit, I overlooked a (hopefully only) corner case that may take the revert lock, namely, the OSS mmap. The OSS mmap operation exceptionally allows to re-configure the parameters inside the OSS mmap syscall, where mm->mmap_mutex is already held. Meanwhile, the copy_from/to_user calls at read/write operations also take the mm->mmap_lock internally, hence it may lead to a AB/BA deadlock. A similar problem was already seen in the past and we fixed it with a refcount (in commit b248371628aa). The former fix covered only the call paths with OSS read/write and OSS ioctls, while we need to cover the concurrent access via both ALSA and OSS APIs now. This patch addresses the problem above by replacing the buffer_mutex lock in the read/write operations with a refcount similar as we've used for OSS. The new field, runtime->buffer_accessing, keeps the number of concurrent read/write operations. Unlike the former buffer_mutex protection, this protects only around the copy_from/to_user() calls; the other codes are basically protected by the PCM stream lock. The refcount can be a negative, meaning blocked by the ioctls. If a negative value is seen, the read/write aborts with -EBUSY. In the ioctl side, OTOH, they check this refcount, too, and set to a negative value for blocking unless it's already being accessed.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

THREAT MONITOR

Am I Vulnerable?

Launch our assessment wizard to check if your infrastructure is exposed to • CVE-2022-49272

Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

Linux
Vulnerable Versions:
73867cb2bc7dfa7fbd219e53a0b68d253d8fda09, b3830197aa7413c65767cf5a1aa8775c83f0dbf7, 08d1807f097a63ea00a7067dad89c1c81cb2115e, 8527c8f052fb42091c6569cb928e472376a4a889, 47711ff10c7e126702cfa725f6d86ef529d15a5f, 4d1b0ace2d56dc27cc4921eda7fae57f77f03eb5, dd2f8c684da3e226e5ec7a81c89ff5fd4a957a03, dca947d4d26dbf925a64a6cfb2ddbc035e831a3d, 5.10.109, 5.15.32, 5.16.18, 5.17.1

Timeline

Official Publish: February 26th, 2025
Last Modified: May 11th, 2026
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.