CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-23100

MediumCVSS 5.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.11%

2th percentile - higher than 2% of all known CVEs

Summary

A bug was found in the Linux kernel's hugetlb_pmd_shared() function, which incorrectly detects PMD table sharing for hugetlb pages. Instead of using the dedicated share count (pt_share_count), the function still relied on the refcount, causing shared PMD tables not to be recognized as shared. This leads to incorrect page migration (e.g., mbind) and wrong reporting in smaps and pagemap interfaces.

Risk Assessment

The organization may experience improper memory management, including migration of non-exclusive pages, potentially breaking data isolation between processes. Additionally, incorrect reporting in smaps and pagemap can hinder security auditing and memory usage monitoring.

Recommendation

Apply the patch available in stable Linux kernel branches (patches #1 and #4 from the series) immediately. Update to a kernel version containing the fix or manually backport the changes.

Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/hugetlb: fix hugetlb_pmd_shared() Patch series "mm/hugetlb: fixes for PMD table sharing (incl. using mmu_gather)", v3. One functional fix, one performance regression fix, and two related comment fixes. I cleaned up my prototype I recently shared [1] for the performance fix, deferring most of the cleanups I had in the prototype to a later point. While doing that I identified the other things. The goal of this patch set is to be backported to stable trees "fairly" easily. At least patch #1 and #4. Patch #1 fixes hugetlb_pmd_shared() not detecting any sharing Patch #2 + #3 are simple comment fixes that patch #4 interacts with. Patch #4 is a fix for the reported performance regression due to excessive IPI broadcasts during fork()+exit(). The last patch is all about TLB flushes, IPIs and mmu_gather. Read: complicated There are plenty of cleanups in the future to be had + one reasonable optimization on x86. But that's all out of scope for this series. Runtime tested, with a focus on fixing the performance regression using the original reproducer [2] on x86. This patch (of 4): We switched from (wrongly) using the page count to an independent shared count. Now, shared page tables have a refcount of 1 (excluding speculative references) and instead use ptdesc->pt_share_count to identify sharing. We didn't convert hugetlb_pmd_shared(), so right now, we would never detect a shared PMD table as such, because sharing/unsharing no longer touches the refcount of a PMD table. Page migration, like mbind() or migrate_pages() would allow for migrating folios mapped into such shared PMD tables, even though the folios are not exclusive. In smaps we would account them as "private" although they are "shared", and we would be wrongly setting the PM_MMAP_EXCLUSIVE in the pagemap interface. Fix it by properly using ptdesc_pmd_is_shared() in hugetlb_pmd_shared().

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