Linux vulnerability

What happened

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: s390/percpu: Fix MVIY_PERCPU() with older binutils Commit a737737cdb9c ("s390/percpu: Infrastructure for more efficient this_cpu operations") introduced MVIY_PERCPU(), which stringifies arguments that are already C string literals. This generates an assembler macro invocation with whitespace-separated quoted arguments: GEN_MVIY "459712" "%r3" GNU as versions prior to binutils 2.39 drop the separating whitespace between quoted macro arguments during input scrubbing. They consequently parse the invocation as a single argument and emit repeated warnings: Warning: missing closing `"' The .ifc in GEN_MVIY never matches and GNU as exits successfully without emitting the mviy instruction. As a result, the interrupted per-CPU sequence is not marked in lowcore and the exception return path cannot repair the per-CPU address register after migration. All MVIY_PERCPU() callers pass C string literals. Use them directly and separate the assembler macro arguments with an explicit comma. The resulting invocation is: GEN_MVIY 459712, %r3 This form is unambiguous for GNU as and LLVM's integrated assembler. This behavior was fixed in GNU as from binutils 2.39, but Linux supports binutils 2.30.

Affected versions

Linux: a737737cdb9c94e40a9926cdc2320f874c05d709 through before 91770b08a120967077ae78600612f18bc5ee3caf (git); a737737cdb9c94e40a9926cdc2320f874c05d709 through before 101782f8945a125044347312d74d488c05741c4a (git); 7.2 Fixed: See vendor advisory.

Why it matters

Review the vendor advisory and exposure of the affected product to determine operational impact.

Detection & mitigation

• Apply vendor-provided updates or mitigations.
• Review affected product exposure and access logs.