In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: serial/pmac_zilog: Remove flawed mitigation for rx irq flood The mitigation was intended to stop the irq completely. That may be better than a hard lock-up but it turns out that you get a crash anyway if you're using pmac_zilog as a serial console: ttyPZ0: pmz: rx irq flood ! BUG: spinlock recursion on CPU#0, swapper/0 That's because the pr_err() call in pmz_receive_chars() results in pmz_console_write() attempting to lock a spinlock already locked in pmz_interrupt(). With CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK=y, this produces a fatal BUG splat. The spinlock in question is the one in struct uart_port. Even when it's not fatal, the serial port rx function ceases to work. Also, the iteration limit doesn't play nicely with QEMU, as can