Bug 2559652 (CVE-2026-98920)
| Summary: | CVE-2026-98920 kernel: netfs: Fix missing alloc tagging of direct mempool allocations | ||
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| Product: | [Other] Security Response | Reporter: | OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport> |
| Component: | vulnerability | Assignee: | Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev> |
| Status: | NEW --- | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | unspecified | CC: | 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 | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | --- | |
| Doc Text: |
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's netfs subsystem. Direct memory pool allocations bypassed required memory tracking hooks when memory profiling debug features are active. A local user accessing files on a network file system can trigger repeated kernel warning messages, which may lead to a Denial of Service (DoS) on systems configured to halt on kernel warnings.
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Story Points: | --- |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | Type: | --- | |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfs: Fix missing alloc tagging of direct mempool allocations Commit 1d78d56c43ef ("netfs: Fix folio_queue ENOMEM in writeback by adding a mempool") added a mempool for the folio_queues and made the request, subrequest and folio_queue allocations distinguish between writeback and everything else. Writeback is part of memory reclaim and must not fail due to ENOMEM, so it allocates under GFP_NOFS through mempool_alloc(), which may dip into the pool's reserve and, if that runs empty, wait for elements to be returned. The GFP_KERNEL paths, which can return -ENOMEM to their callers, invoke the pool's ->alloc() callback directly instead. The direct call, however, skips the alloc_hooks() wrapper that the mempool_alloc() macro provides. The pool callbacks, mempool_alloc_slab() and mempool_kmalloc(), call kmem_cache_alloc_noprof() and kmalloc_noprof() and rely on current->alloc_tag having been set by the caller. With CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_DEBUG=y this leads to current->alloc_tag not set WARNING: ./include/linux/alloc_tag.h:161 at __alloc_tagging_slab_alloc_hook alloc_tag was not set WARNING: ./include/linux/alloc_tag.h:166 at __alloc_tagging_slab_free_hook at allocation and free time respectively, as reported when reading files on a CIFS mount. The allocations are also missing from /proc/allocinfo. Wrap the direct ->alloc() invocations in alloc_hooks() with a new mempool_alloc_noreserve() helper in include/linux/mempool.h, next to the other alloc_hooks()-wrapped macros such as mempool_alloc(). The GFP_KERNEL paths keep their failable allocation semantics, they just get tagged now.