Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98489
Go to dashboardThe atl1c Ethernet driver for Qualcomm Atheros AR8151 NICs can spin forever in its transmit cleanup loop when the hardware reports an out-of-range completion index while the PCIe link resets. The result is a soft lockup that hangs a CPU; the sources describe a denial of service, not code execution.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Only machines with an Atheros AR8151 (atl1c driver) network card are exposed, and the trigger seen was a PCIe link reset such as rebooting a directly linked device. Hosts using other NICs or virtual network devices are not affected.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and check whether the kernel predates the fix; the sources do not name the fixed kernel version.lspci -nn | grep -i atheros to see whether an AR8151 (atl1c) NIC is present.lsmod | grep atl1c to confirm the atl1c driver is loaded.dmesg for 'soft lockup' or 'atl1c' transmit timeout messages.Each row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: atl1c: fix soft lockup on out-of-range tpd_cons read
The hardware can report an out-of-range tpd_cons (seen as 0xffff) while the PCIe link/MAC is resetting. An out-of-range value can never be reached and the loop below would spin forever. To avoid a soft lockup treat it as "nothing new to clean" instead.
Reproduced on two machines, same NIC (Qualcomm Atheros AR8151 v2.0, 4-port), triggered by rebooting a Mikrotik CCR2004 PCIe card that the ports are directly linked to:
Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, kernel 7.0.0-31-generic. The link-flap precursor, before the lockup was captured with a full trace elsewhere:
atl1c 0000:05:00.0 enp5s0f0: NETDEV WATCHDOG: CPU: 4: transmit queue 2 timed out 489984 ms atl1c 0000:05:00.0: MAC state machine can't be idle since disabled for 10ms second atl1c 0000:05:00.0: atl1c: enp5s0f0 NIC Link is Up<65535 Mbps Full Duplex>
65535 (0xffff) here is the same value tpd_cons reads back once the loop below gets stuck.
Proxmox VE, kernel 7.0.14-11-pve. Same NIC/trigger, this time caught by the soft lockup watchdog with a full stack trace:
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#12 stuck for 354s! [napi/eth%d-0:329] CPU: 12 UID: 0 PID: 329 Comm: napi/eth%d-0 Tainted: P O L 7.0.14-11-pve #1 PREEMPT(lazy) RIP: 0010:atl1c_clean_tx+0x142/0x2d0 [atl1c] Call Trace: <TASK> __napi_poll+0x32/0x1e0 napi_threaded_poll_loop+0x286/0x2e0 napi_threaded_poll+0xfd/0x140 kthread+0xf7/0x130 ret_from_fork+0x2da/0x3a0 ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30 </TASK>
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