Bug 2525450 (CVE-2026-80719)

Summary: CVE-2026-80719 kernel: mm: mglru: fix stale batch updates after memcg reparenting
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: 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's Multi-Generational Least Recently Used (MGLRU) page table walker. When memory cgroup (memcg) reparenting occurs concurrently with page table walks, stale batch updates can lead to an underestimation of the number of pages. This can prevent the kernel from reclaiming memory effectively, potentially causing premature Out Of Memory (OOM) conditions and system instability.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-28 07:45:36 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm: mglru: fix stale batch updates after memcg reparenting

The mglru page table walker batches per-generation size deltas in
walk->nr_pages while walking page tables without holding the lruvec lock. 
The reset_batch_size() later folds those deltas into walk->lruvec under
the lruvec lock.

The page table walker can run concurrently with the memcg reparenting path
as follows:

CPU0                           CPU1
====                           ====

walk_mm
--> walk_page_range
    --> update_batch_size
        --> walk->nr_pages += delta

                              mem_cgroup_css_offline
                              --> memcg_reparent_objcgs
                                  --> lock lruvec
                                      lru_gen_reparent_memcg
                                      --> reparent child folios to parent
                                      unlock lruvec

    lock lruvec
    reset_batch_size
    --> child lrugen->nr_pages += delta

This will trigger the following warning in lru_gen_exit_memcg():

	VM_WARN_ON_ONCE(memchr_inv(lruvec->lrugen.nr_pages, 0,
				   sizeof(lruvec->lrugen.nr_pages)));

And the user-visible impact of underestimated nr_pages in MGLRU was
premature OOMs because MGLRU does not try to reclaim memory when nr_pages
reaches zero, but there are still more pages.

To fix it, make reset_batch_size() check CSS_DYING under RCU before
flushing the pending batch.  A non-dying memcg keeps the original lruvec
stable against RCU-delayed offlining; a dying memcg redirects the deltas
to the first non-dying ancestor.