CVE-2025-71140

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: media: mediatek: vcodec: Use spinlock for context list protection lock Previously a mutex was added to protect the encoder and decoder context lists from unexpected changes originating from the SCP IP block, causing the context pointer to go invalid, resulting in a NULL pointer dereference in the IPI handler. Turns out on the MT8173, the VPU IPI handler is called from hard IRQ context. This causes a big warning from the scheduler. This was first reported downstream on the ChromeOS kernels, but is also reproducible on mainline using Fluster with the FFmpeg v4l2m2m decoders. Even though the actual capture format is not supported, the affected code paths are triggered. Since this lock just protects the context list and operations on it are very fast, it should be OK to switch to a spinlock.

Package Linux Kernel
Published 2026-01-14
Last modified 2026-04-15
Patch available
Yes

Affected versions

Linux kernel versions 6.6.27, 6.8.6, 6.9 and later are affected. Fixed in 6.6.120, 6.12.64, 6.18.4, 6.19 and their respective stable series.

Affected from
≥ 6.6.27 ≥ 6.8.6 ≥ 6.9
Fixed in
✓ 6.6.120 6.6.x ✓ 6.12.64 6.12.x ✓ 6.18.4 6.18.x ✓ 6.19

References

The following references provide additional information about CVE-2025-71140 including vendor advisories, patch commits, exploit details, and third-party analysis. Links are sourced from the NIST NVD database.

Frequently asked questions

  • What is CVE-2025-71140?

    CVE-2025-71140 is a unscored severity Linux kernel vulnerability . It affects Linux kernel versions from 6.6.27 onward and has been patched in 6.6.120, 6.12.64, 6.18.4 and others. CVE-2025-71140 has not been confirmed as actively exploited and is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

  • Is there a patch available for CVE-2025-71140?

    Yes — CVE-2025-71140 has been patched. Fixed versions include 6.6.120, 6.12.64, 6.18.4 and others. If you are running Linux kernel 6.6.27 or later up to the fix versions, apply the relevant patch for your kernel branch.

  • Is CVE-2025-71140 actively exploited?

    No — CVE-2025-71140 has not been confirmed as actively exploited. It is not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.