Linux kernel amdgpu kernel driver core (drm/amdgpu/vkms): A NULL pointer dereference in the amdgpu kernel driver core

CVSS 5.5CVE-2023-52815NVIDIA / GPU stackcurated

Impact

A NULL pointer dereference in the amdgpu kernel driver core. An unchecked pointer - typically an optional IP block, an absent connector, or a failed allocation - is dereferenced on an error or corner-case path, panicking the kernel. There is no data disclosure here, but on a shared GPU node the blast radius is the whole machine: the panic kills every tenant's job on that host, not just the one that triggered it, and long training runs lose everything since the last checkpoint. Upstream fix: drm/amdgpu/vkms: fix a possible null pointer dereference

Who can reach it

Local. Reachable by a local user with a render node open, i.e. reachable from inside a GPU tenant container. Not reachable over the network and not reachable from a container that has no GPU device node mapped in.

What to do

Kernel-side fix: this lands in mainline Linux and flows into distro kernels (RHEL/Rocky, Ubuntu HWE, SLES) and into AMD's out-of-tree DKMS amdgpu package shipped with ROCm. Patch the kernel or the DKMS module, then **reload the amdgpu module or reboot the node** - you cannot fix a running driver in place. Reloading amdgpu requires no process holding /dev/kfd or a render node, so in practice this is a cordon + drain + reboot per node. Plan it as a rolling maintenance across the fleet; there is no VBIOS flash, no SBIOS/AGESA step and no firmware update involved. Nodes running the ROCm DKMS stack often lag mainline by a release or two, so confirm the fix is actually present in the AMD driver version you deploy rather than assuming a new distro kernel covers it. Until the reboot window, the only real mitigation is to stop handing the render node to untrusted workloads - the device plugin has to be mapping /dev/dri/renderD* and /dev/kfd into the container for a tenant to reach this at all.

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-52815 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/

Related entries

All NVIDIA / GPU stack entries

This entry is curated: imported from vendor advisories with machine assistance, not yet individually verified. Confirm against your vendor's advisory before acting, and report anything wrong.