CVE-2025-38255

CVE-2025-38255 is a medium-severity vulnerability rated 5.5/10 on the CVSS scale. In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: lib/group_cpus: fix NULL pointer dereference from group_cpus_evenly() While testing null_blk with configfs, echo 0 > poll_queues will trigger following panic: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000010 Oops: Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP NOPTI CPU: 27 UID: 0 PID: 920 Comm: bash Not tainted 6.15.0-02023-gadbdb95c8696-dirty #1238 PREEMPT(undef) Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS 1.16.1-2.fc37 04/01/2014 RIP: 0010:__bitmap_or+0x48/0x70 Call Trace: <TASK> __group_cpus_evenly+0x822/0x8c0 group_cpus_evenly+0x2d9/0x490 blk_mq_map_queues+0x1e/0x110 null_map_queues+0xc9/0x170 [null_blk] blk_mq_update_queue_map+0xdb/0x160 blk_mq_update_nr_hw_queues+0x22b/0x560 nullb_update_nr_hw_queues+0x71/0xf0 [null_blk] nullb_device_poll_queues_store+0xa4/0x130 [null_blk] configfs_write_iter+0x109/0x1d0 vfs_write+0x26e/0x6f0 ksys_write+0x79/0x180 __x64_sys_write+0x1d/0x30 x64_sys_call+0x45c4/0x45f0 do_syscall_64+0xa5/0x240 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e Root cause is that numgrps is set to 0, and ZERO_SIZE_PTR is returned from kcalloc(), and later ZERO_SIZE_PTR will be deferenced. Fix the problem by checking numgrps first in group_cpus_evenly(), and return NULL directly if numgrps is zero. [yukuai3@huawei.com: also fix the non-SMP version]. EPSS estimates a 0.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.