CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-68211

MediumCVSS 5.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.15%

4th percentile - higher than 4% of all known CVEs

Summary

A Linux kernel inefficiency in KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging) was fixed. The scan_get_next_rmap_item() function walked every page address in a VMA, which caused high CPU usage by ksmd when scanning large virtual memory areas with mostly unmapped holes. It was replaced with a range walk using walk_page_range() that skips entire unmapped regions.

Risk Assessment

Without the fix, ksmd can consume 100% CPU for a long time (over an hour in testing) while scanning large, sparsely populated address spaces, effectively stalling page deduplication and loading the system.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing this fix. If updating is not possible, consider limiting or disabling KSM for applications that create very large, sparsely populated memory mappings.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ksm: use range-walk function to jump over holes in scan_get_next_rmap_item Currently, scan_get_next_rmap_item() walks every page address in a VMA to locate mergeable pages. This becomes highly inefficient when scanning large virtual memory areas that contain mostly unmapped regions, causing ksmd to use large amount of cpu without deduplicating much pages. This patch replaces the per-address lookup with a range walk using walk_page_range(). The range walker allows KSM to skip over entire unmapped holes in a VMA, avoiding unnecessary lookups. This problem was previously discussed in [1]. Consider the following test program which creates a 32 TiB mapping in the virtual address space but only populates a single page: #include <unistd.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <sys/mman.h> /* 32 TiB */ const size_t size = 32ul * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024; int main() { char *area = mmap(NULL, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_NORESERVE | MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANON, -1, 0); if (area == MAP_FAILED) { perror("mmap() failed\n"); return -1; } /* Populate a single page such that we get an anon_vma. */ *area = 0; /* Enable KSM. */ madvise(area, size, MADV_MERGEABLE); pause(); return 0; } $ ./ksm-sparse & $ echo 1 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run Without this patch ksmd uses 100% of the cpu for a long time (more then 1 hour in my test machine) scanning all the 32 TiB virtual address space that contain only one mapped page. This makes ksmd essentially deadlocked not able to deduplicate anything of value. With this patch ksmd walks only the one mapped page and skips the rest of the 32 TiB virtual address space, making the scan fast using little cpu.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS