CVE-2022-49210: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

MIPS: pgalloc: fix memory leak caused by pgd_free()

pgd page is freed by generic implementation pgd_free() since commit f9cb654cb550 ("asm-generic: pgalloc: provide generic pgd_free()"), however, there are scenarios that the system uses more than one page as the pgd table, in such cases the generic implementation pgd_free() won't be applicable anymore. For example, when PAGE_SIZE_4KB is enabled and MIPS_VA_BITS_48 is not enabled in a 64bit system, the macro "PGD_ORDER" will be set as "1", which will cause allocating two pages as the pgd table. Well, at the same time, the generic implementation pgd_free() just free one pgd page, which will result in the memory leak.

The memory leak can be easily detected by executing shell command: "while true; do ls > /dev/null; grep MemFree /proc/meminfo; done"