vulnerability

Red Hat: CVE-2024-42234: kernel: mm: fix crashes from deferred split racing folio migration

Severity
5
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
Aug 7, 2024
Added
Jul 9, 2025
Modified
Jul 10, 2025

Description

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

mm: fix crashes from deferred split racing folio migration

Even on 6.10-rc6, I've been seeing elusive "Bad page state"s (often on
flags when freeing, yet the flags shown are not bad: PG_locked had been
set and cleared??), and VM_BUG_ON_PAGE(page_ref_count(page) == 0)s from
deferred_split_scan()'s folio_put(), and a variety of other BUG and WARN
symptoms implying double free by deferred split and large folio migration.

6.7 commit 9bcef5973e31 ("mm: memcg: fix split queue list crash when large
folio migration") was right to fix the memcg-dependent locking broken in
85ce2c517ade ("memcontrol: only transfer the memcg data for migration"),
but missed a subtlety of deferred_split_scan(): it moves folios to its own
local list to work on them without split_queue_lock, during which time
folio->_deferred_list is not empty, but even the "right" lock does nothing
to secure the folio and the list it is on.

Fortunately, deferred_split_scan() is careful to use folio_try_get(): so
folio_migrate_mapping() can avoid the race by folio_undo_large_rmappable()
while the old folio's reference count is temporarily frozen to 0 - adding
such a freeze in the !mapping case too (originally, folio lock and
unmapping and no swap cache left an anon folio unreachable, so no freezing
was needed there: but the deferred split queue offers a way to reach it).

Solution

no-fix-redhat-rpm-package
Title
NEW

Explore Exposure Command

Confidently identify and prioritize exposures from endpoint to cloud with full attack surface visibility and threat-aware risk context.