In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: serial: 8250_port: Check IRQ data before use In case the leaf driver wants to use IRQ polling (irq = 0) and IIR register shows that an interrupt happened in the 8250 hardware the IRQ data can be NULL. In such a case we need to skip the wake event as we came to this path from the timer interrupt and quite likely system is already awake. Without this fix we have got an Oops: serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 0, base_baud = 115200) is a 16550A ... BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000010 RIP: 0010:serial8250_handle_irq+0x7c/0x240 Call Trace: ? serial8250_handle_irq+0x7c/0x240 ? __pfx_serial8250_timeout+0x10/0x10