Bug 2559652 (CVE-2026-98920) - CVE-2026-98920 kernel: netfs: Fix missing alloc tagging of direct mempool allocations
Summary: CVE-2026-98920 kernel: netfs: Fix missing alloc tagging of direct mempool all...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2026-98920
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-10-23 12:52 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-10-27 11:18 UTC (History)
17 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-23 12:52:48 UTC
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.


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