In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ixgbe: fix pci device refcount leak As the comment of pcigetdomainbusandslot() says, it returns a PCI device with refcount incremented, when finish using it, the caller must decrement the reference count by calling pcidevput(). In ixgbegetfirstsecondarydevfn() and ixgbex550emahasmii(), pcidev_put() is called to avoid leak.