Findings

CVE-2024-35877

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/mm/pat: fix VM_PAT handling in COW mappings PAT handling won't do the right thing in COW mappin…

Published May 19, 2024 · updated Oct 15, 2026 · linux linux kernel

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/mm/pat: fix VM_PAT handling in COW mappings PAT handling won't do the right thing in COW mappings: the first PTE (or, in fact, all PTEs) can be replaced during write faults to point at anon folios. Reliably recovering the correct PFN and cachemode using follow_phys() from PTEs will not work in COW mappings. Using follow_phys(), we might just get the address+protection of the anon folio (which is very wrong), or fail on swap/nonswap entries, failing follow_phys() and triggering a WARN_ON_ONCE() in untrack_pfn() and track_pfn_copy(), not properly calling free_pfn_range(). In free_pfn_range(), we either wouldn't call memtype_free() or would call it with the wrong range, possibly leaking memory. To fix that, let's update follow_phys() to refuse returning anon folios, and fallback to using the stored PFN inside vma->vm_pgoff for COW mappings if we run into that. We will now properly handle untrack_pfn() with COW mappings, where we don't need the cachemode. We'll have to fail fork()->track_pfn_copy() if the first page was replaced by an anon folio, though: we'd have to store the cachemode in the VMA to make this work, likely growing the VMA size. For now, lets keep it simple and let track_pfn_copy() just fail in that case: it would have failed in the past with swap/nonswap entries already, and it would have done the wrong thing with anon folios. Simple reproducer to trigger the WARN_ON_ONCE() in untrack_pfn(): #include #include #include #include int main(void) { struct io_uring_params p = {}; int ring_fd; size_t size; char *map; ring_fd = io_uring_setup(1, &p); if (ring_fd On a system with 16 GiB RAM and swap configured: # ./iouring & # memhog 16G # killall iouring [ 301.552930] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [ 301.553285] WARNING: CPU: 7 PID: 1402 at arch/x86/mm/pat/memtype.c:1060 untrack_pfn+0xf4/0x100 [ 301.553989] Modules linked in: binfmt_misc nft_fib_inet nft_fib_ipv4 nft_fib_ipv6 nft_fib