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.
Advisories

No advisories yet.

Fixes

Solution

No solution given by the vendor.


Workaround

No workaround given by the vendor.

History

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description 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.
Title media: mediatek: vcodec: Use spinlock for context list protection lock
First Time appeared Linux
Linux linux Kernel
CPEs cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
Vendors & Products Linux
Linux linux Kernel
References

Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: Linux

Published:

Updated: 2026-01-14T15:07:53.581Z

Reserved: 2026-01-13T15:30:19.660Z

Link: CVE-2025-71140

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2026-01-14T15:16:03.793

Modified: 2026-01-14T16:25:12.057

Link: CVE-2025-71140

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.

Weaknesses

No weakness.