In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: riscv: Prevent a bad reference count on CPU nodes When populating cache leaves we previously fetched the CPU device node at the very beginning. But when ACPI is enabled we go through a specific branch which returns early and does not call 'of_node_put' for the node that was acquired. Since we are not using a CPU device node for the ACPI code anyways, we can simply move the initialization of it just passed the ACPI block, and we are guaranteed to have an 'of_node_put' call for the acquired node. This prevents a bad reference count of the CPU device node. Moreover, the previous function did not check for errors when acquiring the device node, so a return -ENOENT has been added for that case.