Bug 2546486 (CVE-2026-98225)

Summary: CVE-2026-98225 kernel: mm/shrinker: fix bogus set_shrinker_bit() with cgroup.memory=nokmem
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: 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
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's memory management subsystem. A local attacker can trigger kernel warnings and potentially cause a Denial of Service (DoS) or system instability when kernel memory accounting is disabled. Under this configuration, memory shrinker identifiers are not properly initialized, causing subsequent memory-splitting operations to fail internal bounds checks.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-06 09:30:07 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/shrinker: fix bogus set_shrinker_bit() with cgroup.memory=nokmem

With cgroup.memory=nokmem, shrinker_memcg_alloc() bails out early and
never allocates an id, so shrinker->id keeps the 0 it got from the
kzalloc() in shrinker_alloc().  __list_lru_init() then copies that 0 into
lru->shrinker_id, where it looks like a valid bit index.

Nothing calls expand_shrinker_info() on nokmem either, so shrinker_nr_max
stays 0 and every memcg ends up with an empty map (map_nr_max == 0).

deferred_split_folio() hands a real memcg to __list_lru_add() regardless
of whether the lru is memcg aware, so the first THP queued in a cgroup
does set_shrinker_bit(memcg, nid, 0) and trips the bounds check:

WARNING: mm/shrinker.c:212 at set_shrinker_bit+0x7d/0x90, CPU#126
Call Trace:
 <TASK>
 deferred_split_folio+0x18c/0x220
 map_anon_folio_pmd_nopf+0xdd/0x130
 map_anon_folio_pmd_pf+0x14/0xb0
 do_huge_pmd_anonymous_page+0x1a1/0x620
 __handle_mm_fault+0xea9/0x10d0
 handle_mm_fault+0xe5/0x320
 do_user_addr_fault+0x1cc/0x870
 exc_page_fault+0x81/0x1b0
 asm_exc_page_fault+0x27/0x30
 </TASK>

Harmless, the WARN_ON_ONCE() is what keeps the out of bounds unit[] read
from happening, but the id should not look valid in the first place. 
Clear it before returning.

Two other spots could paper over this: drop the id in __list_lru_init()
when nokmem turns memcg_aware off, or make deferred_split_folio() pass
NULL like list_lru_add_obj() does.  Both leave shrinker->id lying around
for the next caller, so fix it where the id is handed out.