vulnerability

Red Hat: CVE-2024-35846: kernel: mm: zswap: fix shrinker NULL crash with cgroup_disable=memory

Severity
5
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
May 17, 2024
Added
Jul 9, 2025
Modified
Jul 10, 2025

Description

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

mm: zswap: fix shrinker NULL crash with cgroup_disable=memory

Christian reports a NULL deref in zswap that he bisected down to the zswap
shrinker. The issue also cropped up in the bug trackers of libguestfs [1]
and the Red Hat bugzilla [2].

The problem is that when memcg is disabled with the boot time flag, the
zswap shrinker might get called with sc->memcg == NULL. This is okay in
many places, like the lruvec operations. But it crashes in
memcg_page_state() - which is only used due to the non-node accounting of
cgroup's the zswap memory to begin with.

Nhat spotted that the memcg can be NULL in the memcg-disabled case, and I
was then able to reproduce the crash locally as well.

[1] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/139
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2275252

Solution

no-fix-redhat-rpm-package
Title
NEW

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