Bug 2540215 (CVE-2026-93232)

Summary: CVE-2026-93232 kernel: mm/hugetlb: fix boot panic with CONFIG_DEBUG_VM and HVO bootmem pages
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, 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 HugeTLB (huge page memory management) subsystem. During system startup, an uninitialized memory dereference occurs when HugeTLB Vmemmap Optimization (HVO) is enabled on a kernel compiled with virtual memory debugging options. A local user able to configure or restart the system with these parameters can trigger this flaw, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) via a kernel panic that prevents the operating system from booting.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-24 15:42:26 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/hugetlb: fix boot panic with CONFIG_DEBUG_VM and HVO bootmem pages

Patch series "mm: Refactor bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation", v4.

This series is split out from the earlier larger series "mm: Generalize
HVO for HugeTLB and device DAX" [1].  It collects the first 19 patches of
that series as a standalone set of fixes and preparatory cleanups around
bootmem HugeTLB handling, sparse initialization ordering, and related
vmemmap setup.

The first patches fix a few bugs found while reviewing the existing code,
including incorrect bootmem HVO handling, wrong vmemmap registration
arguments, a powerpc compound-vmemmap tracking bug, and too-late
initialization of gigantic bootmem HugeTLB struct pages.

The rest of the series reorders early memory initialization so the
relevant zone state is available before sparse and HugeTLB boot-time setup
runs, then simplifies the remaining bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation
path and removes code made obsolete by that rework.

At a high level:
  - patches [1-4] fix boot-time and arch-specific bugs
  - patches [5-12] reorder and simplify sparse/mm/hugetlb early init
  - patches [13-19] refactor bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation and
    remove obsolete helpers and state


This patch (of 19):

Commit 622026e87c40 ("mm/hugetlb: remove fake head pages") switched
HVO to reuse per-zone shared tail pages from zone->vmemmap_tails[].

Those shared tail pages were initialized in hugetlb_vmemmap_init(), but
bootmem HugeTLB folios are prepared earlier from
gather_bootmem_prealloc().  With hugetlb_free_vmemmap=on,
prep_and_add_bootmem_folios() can access pageblock flags on bootmem
HugeTLB pages whose mirrored tail struct pages already point to the shared
tail page.  On CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels, get_pfnblock_bitmap_bitidx() then
dereferences the still-uninitialized shared tail page and can panic during
boot.

Initialize zone->vmemmap_tails[] from gather_bootmem_prealloc(), before
bootmem HugeTLB folios are processed, and drop the later initialization
from hugetlb_vmemmap_init().

This bug only affects CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels, where the relevant
assertion is evaluated.