Bug 2440614 (CVE-2026-23211)

Summary: CVE-2026-23211 kernel: mm, swap: restore swap_space attr aviod kernel panic
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: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's memory management swap subsystem. A previous commit marked the swap address space as read-only, but when arch_prepare_to_swap() fails under heavy memory pressure, the kernel attempts to set a writeback error on the read-only mapping. This triggers a kernel panic during memory reclaim operations in the page fault handler path.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-02-18 15:01:48 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm, swap: restore swap_space attr aviod kernel panic

commit 8b47299a411a ("mm, swap: mark swap address space ro and add context
debug check") made the swap address space read-only.  It may lead to
kernel panic if arch_prepare_to_swap returns a failure under heavy memory
pressure as follows,

el1_abort+0x40/0x64
el1h_64_sync_handler+0x48/0xcc
el1h_64_sync+0x84/0x88
errseq_set+0x4c/0xb8 (P)
__filemap_set_wb_err+0x20/0xd0
shrink_folio_list+0xc20/0x11cc
evict_folios+0x1520/0x1be4
try_to_shrink_lruvec+0x27c/0x3dc
shrink_one+0x9c/0x228
shrink_node+0xb3c/0xeac
do_try_to_free_pages+0x170/0x4f0
try_to_free_pages+0x334/0x534
__alloc_pages_direct_reclaim+0x90/0x158
__alloc_pages_slowpath+0x334/0x588
__alloc_frozen_pages_noprof+0x224/0x2fc
__folio_alloc_noprof+0x14/0x64
vma_alloc_zeroed_movable_folio+0x34/0x44
do_pte_missing+0xad4/0x1040
handle_mm_fault+0x4a4/0x790
do_page_fault+0x288/0x5f8
do_translation_fault+0x38/0x54
do_mem_abort+0x54/0xa8

Restore swap address space as not ro to avoid the panic.