Bug 2517004 (CVE-2026-74518)

Summary: CVE-2026-74518 kernel: mm/hugetlb: fix list corruption in allocate_file_region_entries()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
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Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. The allocate_file_region_entries() function, responsible for managing huge page memory regions, can suffer from list corruption. This occurs because the list_splice() operation does not properly re-initialize a list head, allowing concurrent access to shared memory maps to corrupt the internal data structure. An attacker could exploit this to cause a kernel panic, leading to a Denial of Service, or potentially a use-after-free condition.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-15 12:44:18 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/hugetlb: fix list corruption in allocate_file_region_entries()

allocate_file_region_entries() tops up resv->region_cache with freshly
allocated file_region descriptors.  The allocation uses GFP_KERNEL, so
resv->lock is dropped around it: the new entries are gathered on a
stack-local list head, allocated_regions, and spliced into
resv->region_cache once the lock is re-acquired.

The splice used list_splice(), which moves the entries but does not
re-initialize the source head, so allocated_regions is left pointing at an
entry that now lives on resv->region_cache.  The top-up runs in a while
loop that re-checks the cache deficit after re-acquiring the lock.  For a
shared mapping the resv_map is shared by every mapper of the hugetlbfs
inode, so a concurrent region_chg()/region_add()/region_del() on the same
resv_map can consume cache entries during the unlocked window and force a
second iteration.  That iteration calls list_add() on the stale head and
corrupts the list; with CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST the __list_add_valid() check
trips:

  list_add corruption. next->prev should be prev (ffffc900011ff7f8),
  but was ffff88814c281460. (next=ffff88814c545640).
  kernel BUG at lib/list_debug.c:31!
   allocate_file_region_entries+0x191/0x420
   region_chg+0x267/0x300
   hugetlb_reserve_pages+0x387/0xc80
   hugetlbfs_file_mmap+0x2ce/0x3f0
   mmap_region+0x1348/0x1a80
   do_mmap+0x85e/0xb90
   vm_mmap_pgoff+0x18c/0x330
   ksys_mmap_pgoff+0x2a1/0x3e0
   do_syscall_64+0xd7/0x420

Without CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST the bad list_add() silently links a kernel-stack
address into resv->region_cache, leading to later use-after-free.

This was observed as a real host panic on a dense KVM host where a QEMU
guest-RAM hugetlbfs file was mapped MAP_SHARED by both QEMU and a separate
SPDK/DPDK vhost-user target, generating concurrent region_* traffic on one
shared resv_map.

Use list_splice_init() so the source head is re-initialized empty after
each splice, making the retry loop safe.