Skip to main content
← All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-93232

mm/hugetlb: fix boot panic with CONFIG_DEBUG_VM and HVO bootmem pages

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 7.2.4
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/hugetlb: fix boot panic with CONFIG_DEBUG_VM and HVO bootmem pages Patch series "mm: Refactor bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation", v4. This series is split out from the earlier larger series "mm: Generalize HVO for HugeTLB and device DAX" [1]. It collects the first 19 patches of that series as a standalone set of fixes and preparatory cleanups around bootmem HugeTLB handling, sparse initialization ordering, and related vmemmap setup. The first patches fix a few bugs found while reviewing the existing code, including incorrect bootmem HVO handling, wrong vmemmap registration arguments, a powerpc compound-vmemmap tracking bug, and too-late initialization of gigantic bootmem HugeTLB struct pages. The rest of the series reorders early memory initialization so the relevant zone state is available before sparse and HugeTLB boot-time setup runs, then simplifies the remaining bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation path and removes code made obsolete by that rework. At a high level: • patches [1-4] fix boot-time and arch-specific bugs • patches [5-12] reorder and simplify sparse/mm/hugetlb early init • patches [13-19] refactor bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation and remove obsolete helpers and state This patch (of 19): Commit 622026e87c40 ("mm/hugetlb: remove fake head pages") switched HVO to reuse per-zone shared tail pages from zone->vmemmap_tails[]. Those shared tail pages were initialized in hugetlb_vmemmap_init(), but bootmem HugeTLB folios are prepared earlier from gather_bootmem_prealloc(). With hugetlb_free_vmemmap=on, prep_and_add_bootmem_folios() can access pageblock flags on bootmem HugeTLB pages whose mirrored tail struct pages already point to the shared tail page. On CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels, get_pfnblock_bitmap_bitidx() then dereferences the still-uninitialized shared tail page and can panic during boot. Initialize zone->vmemmap_tails[] from gather_bootmem_prealloc(), before bootmem HugeTLB folios are processed, and drop the later initialization from hugetlb_vmemmap_init(). This bug only affects CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels, where the relevant assertion is evaluated.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • Linux Linux

    From 622026e87c4019e609010811757e31193cc23847 · fixed in 2ddf429e25cf8415d9c308f07e64012026bd4d77; From 622026e87c4019e609010811757e31193cc23847 · fixed in c0caeceb0c3899dc42844d3979093b27d1434108

  • Linux Linux

    7.1

  • KernelLinux

    From 7.1.0 · fixed in 7.2.4

References 2

git.kernel.org