CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-74599
- Status
- Received
- Published
- 2026-08-22
- Last modified
- 2026-10-14
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/ptdump: always stabilise against page table freeing using init_mm
Previous commits have established the invariant that kernel page table
freeing is performed while an mmap read lock on init_mm is held, which
fixes races between ptdump and kernel page table freeing over init_mm.
However, x86 and arm64 can perform a ptdump over an mm other than init_mm
via ptdump_walk_pgd() and since kernel memory ranges are shared across
non-kernel mm's, this means that the race still exists for these cases.
Fix this by acquiring a nested mmap write lock for init_mm in
ptdump_walk_pgd().
This is safe as we take this after mmap write locking the mm, and nothing
acquires the init_mm lock first before locking an arbitrary mm, so no
deadlock is possible.
Also update walk_page_range_debug() to assert that init_mm is write
locked, add a comment explaining why and remove some redundant code, and
eliminate the unnecessary and confusing invocation of
walk_kernel_page_table_range().
We can safely remove the non-NULL check for walk.mm, as the mmap lock
asserts would NULL pointer deref if it was (and of course no callers do
this).
The first point at which ptdump can race kernel page table freeing is
commit b6bdb7517c3d ("mm/vmalloc: add interfaces to free unmapped page
table"), so we target this in the Fixes tag.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/27c32e5538344b13c1505a08861e04620c125d47 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3c0391b9a774cc0854f3152e484a9d4835b12b40 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4adc4c9a9a43d61fe476dfe10811f3df2e7e4106 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/76df4edf7d61ecb711bc517ff4c20a5e85c4e9f7 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7f740664aec1f832953c2e6d9b8920cd6c8bcc0c git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b9c6d048bdfaae78d7d921b454f7de7baefaa2f0 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cbd9583bb6f70733d0022a66d3546a15c76ae744 git.kernel.org