ISSUE DESCRIPTION ================= Huge (2Mb) pages are generally unavailable to PV guests. Since x86 Linux pvops-based kernels are generally multi purpose, they would normally be built with hugetlbfs support enabled. Use of that functionality by an application in a PV guest would cause an infinite page fault loop, and an OOPS to occur upon an attempt to terminate the hung application. IMPACT ====== Depending on the guest kernel configuration, the OOPS could result in a kernel crash (guest DoS). VULNERABLE SYSTEMS ================== All upstream x86 Linux versions operating as PV Xen guests are vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. x86 HVM guests are not vulnerable. x86 Linux versions derived from linux-2.6.18-xen.hg (XenoLinux) are not vulnerable. Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernels are not vulnerable. We believe that non-Linux guests are not vulnerable, as we are not aware of any with an analogous bug. MITIGATION ========== Running only HVM guests will avoid this issue. Not enabling hugetlbfs use, by not altering the boot time default value of zero in /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages (which can only be written by the root user) will avoid this issue. It is possible that disabling (or not enabling) the "panic on OOPS" behavior (via use of the "oops=panic" command line option or the "panic_on_oops" sysctl) will also avoid this issue, by limiting the effect to an application crash. We are not currently sure whether this is an effective mitigation, as we are not sure whether any locks or mutexes are held at the point of the crash. External References: http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-174.html Acknowledgements: Name: the Xen project
Created attachment 1143682 [details] Upstream patch for Linux 4.5.x ... 3.10.x
Created xen tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1327219]
Public via: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q2/73
We should have probably created RHEL6 bug for it as we still support PV guests with it. The issue was initially reported as a RHEL bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1312331 but it is not linked from here and we'll have to put the fix in z-streams.
binutils-2.26-18.fc24, kernel-4.5.2-301.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
kernel-4.4.8-300.fc23 has been pushed to the Fedora 23 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
kernel-4.4.8-200.fc22 has been pushed to the Fedora 22 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.