CVE-2026-98143
Received Received - Intake

Incorrect Command Stream Parsing in Linux Kernel Ethosu NPU Driver

Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-98143, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.

Publication date: 2026-09-25

Last updated on: 2026-09-25

Assigner: kernel.org

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: accel: ethosu: Don't read the U65 rounding mode as a storage mode Bits 15:14 of NPU_SET_{IFM,OFM}_PRECISION select the activation storage mode on U85 only. On U65 the same field holds the rounding mode, and the command stream parser has read it as a storage mode since the driver was added. That went unnoticed while unknown values fell through the switch, but now that they are rejected, every U65 command stream that asks for natural rounding (2) fails CMDSTREAM_BO_CREATE with -EINVAL. Mesa emits it for average pooling, concatenation, split, unpack, strided slice, LUT and argmax, which is 72 failures of the Teflon test suite on an i.MX93. Truncating rounding (1) is misread as well: it picks the two-tile address path and computes a bogus feature map size from tile bases the command stream never set. Read the field as a storage mode only on the hardware where it is one.

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Meta Information

Published
2026-09-25
Last Modified
2026-09-25
Generated
2026-09-25
AI Q&A
2026-09-25
EPSS Evaluated
N/A
NVD
EUVD

Affected Vendors & Products

Currently, no data is known.

Helpful Resources

Exploitability

CWE
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KEV
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CWE ID Description
CWE-UNKNOWN

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Executive Summary

This vulnerability is in the Linux kernel's ethosu accelerator driver. It involves misinterpreting bits 15:14 of NPU_SET_{IFM,OFM}_PRECISION on U65 hardware as a storage mode instead of a rounding mode. This causes command streams to fail with -EINVAL when natural rounding is requested, affecting operations like average pooling and concatenation.

Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can cause failures in NPU operations on U65 hardware, leading to errors in tasks like average pooling, concatenation, and other neural network computations. It may disrupt applications relying on the ethosu accelerator.

Mitigation Strategies

Update the Linux kernel to a patched version that resolves the issue with NPU_SET_IFM_OFM_PRECISION field handling on U65 hardware. This requires kernel version updates or patches from your Linux distribution or vendor.

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