CVE-2023-53596

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drivers: base: Free devm resources when unregistering a device In the current code, devres_release_all() only gets called if the device has a bus and has been probed. This leads to issues when using bus-less or driver-less device...

high 7.8 CVSS 3.1
Published: Oct 4, 2025
Modified: Jun 1, 2026
Vendor: Linux
Product: Linux Kernel

Description

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

drivers: base: Free devm resources when unregistering a device

In the current code, devres_release_all() only gets called if the device
has a bus and has been probed.

This leads to issues when using bus-less or driver-less devices where
the device might never get freed if a managed resource holds a reference
to the device. This is happening in the DRM framework for example.

We should thus call devres_release_all() in the device_del() function to
make sure that the device-managed actions are properly executed when the
device is unregistered, even if it has neither a bus nor a driver.

This is effectively the same change than commit 2f8d16a996da ("devres:
release resources on device_del()") that got reverted by commit
a525a3ddeaca ("driver core: free devres in device_release") over
memory leaks concerns.

This patch effectively combines the two commits mentioned above to
release the resources both on device_del() and device_release() and get
the best of both worlds.

References

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