Bug 2373372 (CVE-2025-38008)

Summary: CVE-2025-38008 kernel: mm/page_alloc: fix race condition in unaccepted memory handling
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: dfreiber, drow, jburrell, vkumar
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-06-18 10:04:13 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/page_alloc: fix race condition in unaccepted memory handling

The page allocator tracks the number of zones that have unaccepted memory
using static_branch_enc/dec() and uses that static branch in hot paths to
determine if it needs to deal with unaccepted memory.

Borislav and Thomas pointed out that the tracking is racy: operations on
static_branch are not serialized against adding/removing unaccepted pages
to/from the zone.

Sanity checks inside static_branch machinery detects it:

WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 10 at kernel/jump_label.c:276 __static_key_slow_dec_cpuslocked+0x8e/0xa0

The comment around the WARN() explains the problem:

	/*
	 * Warn about the '-1' case though; since that means a
	 * decrement is concurrent with a first (0->1) increment. IOW
	 * people are trying to disable something that wasn't yet fully
	 * enabled. This suggests an ordering problem on the user side.
	 */

The effect of this static_branch optimization is only visible on
microbenchmark.

Instead of adding more complexity around it, remove it altogether.

Comment 1 Avinash Hanwate 2025-06-20 16:51:01 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025061841-CVE-2025-38008-a365@gregkh/T