Bug 2535134 (CVE-2026-89915) - CVE-2026-89915 kernel: KVM: arm64: Remove VM-wide VNCR mapping counter
Summary: CVE-2026-89915 kernel: KVM: arm64: Remove VM-wide VNCR mapping counter
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2026-89915
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-09-16 10:55 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-10-24 03:45 UTC (History)
17 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-16 10:55:17 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

KVM: arm64: Remove VM-wide VNCR mapping counter

The global VNCR mapping counter is used to decide whether an L1
provided VNCR page is mapped in L0 on any CPU at the point of
dealing with a TLB invalidation. It is incremented when a mapping
is made in the fixmap, and decremented when unmapped.

As it turns out, this tracking has several flaws:

- we are trying to invalidate TLBs, and the mapping is only an
  opportunistic consequence of the TLB. Checking this counter to
  decide whether a TLB needs to be invalidated may result in missed
  invalidations.

- an L1 vcpu invalidating its own TLB (a very likely case) will not
  succeed in invalidating the VNCR pseudo TLB because that page is
  not mapped in L0 at this stage.

Given that this tracking fails at delivering the minimum guarantees
that are required and is only a performance optimisation, remove it
completely.


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