Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

firmware: arm_scmi: Drop handle on protocol bind failures

The SCMI bus notifier acquires an SCMI handle when the driver core emits BUS_NOTIFY_BIND_DRIVER, before invoking the protocol driver probe callback. The protocol probe path only checks whether sdev->handle is set.

If device_link_add() fails after the handle has been acquired, the protocol device can still bind with a valid handle but without the dependency link to the SCMI parent. A concurrent parent unbind can then miss the child and tear down the SCMI instance while the child still holds a handle into it.

If the protocol driver probe later fails, for example with -EPROBE_DEFER, the driver core emits BUS_NOTIFY_DRIVER_NOT_BOUND rather than BUS_NOTIFY_UNBOUND_DRIVER. The SCMI notifier only released the handle on BUS_NOTIFY_UNBOUND_DRIVER, so each failed protocol-device bind leaked the SCMI instance users refcount and left sdev->handle set after the failed probe.

Make the link helper report failure and drop the acquired handle if the link cannot be created. Also handle BUS_NOTIFY_DRIVER_NOT_BOUND in the same cleanup path used for unbind so failed probes balance the earlier BUS_NOTIFY_BIND_DRIVER acquisition.