Affected: Linux

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

net: mdio: unexport __init-annotated mdio_bus_init()

EXPORT_SYMBOL and __init is a bad combination because the .init.text section is freed up after the initialization. Hence, modules cannot use symbols annotated __init. The access to a freed symbol may end up with kernel panic.

modpost used to detect it, but it has been broken for a decade.

Recently, I fixed modpost so it started to warn it again, then this showed up in linux-next builds.

There are two ways to fix it:

- Remove __init - Remove EXPORT_SYMBOL

I chose the latter for this case because the only in-tree call-site, drivers/net/phy/phy_device.c is never compiled as modular. (CONFIG_PHYLIB is boolean)