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vulnerability

Ubuntu: (Multiple Advisories) (CVE-2025-38241): Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Severity
5
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
Jul 9, 2025
Added
Jul 14, 2025
Modified
Mar 27, 2026

Description

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

mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

Following softlockup can be easily reproduced on my test machine with:

echo always > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepages-64kB/enabled
swapon /dev/zram0 # zram0 is a 48G swap device
mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test
echo 1G > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.max
echo $BASHPID > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/cgroup.procs
while true; do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1M count=5120
cat /tmp/test.img > /dev/null
rm /tmp/test.img
done

Then after a while:
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 763s! [cat:5787]
Modules linked in: zram virtiofs
CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 5787 Comm: cat Kdump: loaded Tainted: G L 6.15.0.orig-gf3021d9246bc-dirty #118 PREEMPT(voluntary)·
Tainted: [L]=SOFTLOCKUP
Hardware name: Red Hat KVM/RHEL-AV, BIOS 0.0.0 02/06/2015
RIP: 0010:mpol_shared_policy_lookup+0xd/0x70
Code: e9 b8 b4 ff ff 31 c0 c3 cc cc cc cc 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 66 0f 1f 00 0f 1f 44 00 00 41 54 55 53 <48> 8b 1f 48 85 db 74 41 4c 8d 67 08 48 89 fb 48 89 f5 4c 89 e7 e8
RSP: 0018:ffffc90002b1fc28 EFLAGS: 00000202
RAX: 00000000001c20ca RBX: 0000000000724e1e RCX: 0000000000000001
RDX: ffff888118e214c8 RSI: 0000000000057d42 RDI: ffff888118e21518
RBP: 000000000002bec8 R08: 0000000000000001 R09: 0000000000000000
R10: 0000000000000bf4 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: 0000000000000001
R13: 00000000001c20ca R14: 00000000001c20ca R15: 0000000000000000
FS: 00007f03f995c740(0000) GS:ffff88a07ad9a000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
CR2: 00007f03f98f1000 CR3: 0000000144626004 CR4: 0000000000770eb0
DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000fffe0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
PKRU: 55555554
Call Trace:
<TASK>
shmem_alloc_folio+0x31/0xc0
shmem_swapin_folio+0x309/0xcf0
? filemap_get_entry+0x117/0x1e0
? xas_load+0xd/0xb0
? filemap_get_entry+0x101/0x1e0
shmem_get_folio_gfp+0x2ed/0x5b0
shmem_file_read_iter+0x7f/0x2e0
vfs_read+0x252/0x330
ksys_read+0x68/0xf0
do_syscall_64+0x4c/0x1c0
entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e
RIP: 0033:0x7f03f9a46991
Code: 00 48 8b 15 81 14 10 00 f7 d8 64 89 02 b8 ff ff ff ff eb bd e8 20 ad 01 00 f3 0f 1e fa 80 3d 35 97 10 00 00 74 13 31 c0 0f 05 <48> 3d 00 f0 ff ff 77 4f c3 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 55 48 89 e5 48 83 ec
RSP: 002b:00007fff3c52bd28 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000000
RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 0000000000040000 RCX: 00007f03f9a46991
RDX: 0000000000040000 RSI: 00007f03f98ba000 RDI: 0000000000000003
RBP: 00007fff3c52bd50 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: 00007f03f9b9a380
R10: 0000000000000022 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 0000000000040000
R13: 00007f03f98ba000 R14: 0000000000000003 R15: 0000000000000000
</TASK>

The reason is simple, readahead brought some order 0 folio in swap cache,
and the swapin mTHP folio being allocated is in conflict with it, so
swapcache_prepare fails and causes shmem_swap_alloc_folio to return
-EEXIST, and shmem simply retries again and again causing this loop.

Fix it by applying a similar fix for anon mTHP swapin.

The performance change is very slight, time of swapin 10g zero folios
with shmem (test for 12 times):
Before: 2.47s
After: 2.48s

[[email protected]: add comment]

Solutions

ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1007-azure-nvidiaubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1014-azureubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1014-oemubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1014-realtimeubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1015-awsubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1015-aws-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1015-oracleubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1015-oracle-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1016-raspiubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1018-gcpubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-1018-gcp-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-34-genericubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-6-14-0-34-generic-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-awsubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-aws-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-aws-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-aws-64k-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-azureubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-azure-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-azure-nvidiaubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-azure-nvidia-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-gcpubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-gcp-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-gcp-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-gcp-64k-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-genericubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-generic-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-generic-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-generic-64k-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-generic-64k-hwe-24-04ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-generic-hwe-24-04ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oem-24-04ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oem-24-04aubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oem-24-04bubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oem-24-04cubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oem-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oracleubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oracle-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oracle-64kubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-oracle-64k-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-raspiubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-raspi-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-realtimeubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-realtime-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-realtime-hwe-24-04ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-virtualubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-virtual-6-14ubuntu-upgrade-linux-image-virtual-hwe-24-04

References

    Title
    Rapid7 Labs

    2026 Global Threat Landscape Report

    The predictive window has collapsed. Exploitation follows disclosure in days. See how attackers are accelerating and how to stay ahead.