Last updated: November 11, 2025
Preface: AMD Xilinx refers to the former independent company Xilinx, which was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in February 2022.
Xilinx’s current and past product lines include: Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), System-on-Chip (SoC) Devices, Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platforms (ACAPs), Data Center Accelerator Cards & System-on-Modules (SoMs).
Xilinx provides countless meta layers that enable developers to build all the necessary components for running Linux on Xilinx SoCs.
Background: In XRT, the xocl driver manages device memory through the abstraction of buffer objects (BOs), which are allocated using specific I/O control (ioctl) commands from user space via the XRT core library APIs. User-facing applications do not directly interact with kernel functions, but use the XRT API to manage memory.
Device memory allocation is modeled as buffer objects (bo). For each bo driver tracks the host pointer backed by scatter gather list – which provides backing storage on host – and the corresponding device side allocation of contiguous buffer in one of the memory mapped DDRs/BRAMs, etc.
Remark: The xocl driver is a key Linux kernel component of XRT specifically designed for PCIe-based platforms, managing user-facing functions and communication with the FPGA.
Vulnerability details: CVE-2025-52538 – Improper input validation within the XOCL driver may allow a local attacker to generate an integer overflow condition, potentially resulting in loss of confidentiality or availability.
From a cybersecurity perspective:
• The XOCL driver manages device memory via buffer objects (BOs) and uses ioctl commands for allocation.
• The vulnerability occurs because size calculations for BOs were not properly validated, leading to potential overflow when adding offsets or sizes.
• AMD’s patch reportedly adds stricter input validation and bounds checking before performing arithmetic operations.
Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details –
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-8014.html