CVE-2026-97945

Status: UPDATED  |  Advisory ID: CVE-2026-97945

Key Details

Affected Products, Subsystems & Sectors

What to Know

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

x86/mm: Fix user-space data loss with MADV_FREE and THP

Some of users of Polars (a data analytics library) have lost production

data from this bug. They seem to have just the right combination of

huge pages, MADV_FREE and heavy reclaim pressure.

pmd_modify() masks the old value with (_HPAGE_CHG_MASK & ~_PAGE_DIRTY),

silently discarding the hardware dirty bit. The subsequent

pmd_mksaveddirty() call is supposed to transfer _PAGE_DIRTY into

_PAGE_SAVED_DIRTY when write-protecting, but the dirty bit was already

stripped from the value, so there is nothing left to transfer.

Contrast with pte_modify(), which keeps _PAGE_DIRTY_BITS in its mask,

and pud_modify(), which keeps _HPAGE_CHG_MASK untouched: pmd_modify()

is the odd one out. Any pmd_modify() on a writable, dirty PMD loses

the dirty state.

One visible consequence is data loss with MADV_FREE on PMD-mapped THP:

memset(buf, 0x5A, size); // PMD-mapped THP, PMD dirty

madvise(buf, size, MADV_FREE); // PMD cleaned but left writable,

// folio marked lazyfree

memset(buf, 0x5A, size); // hardware sets _PAGE_DIRTY again

mprotect(buf, size, PROT_READ); // pmd_modify() drops the dirty bit

mprotect(buf, size, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE);

// ... memory pressure ...

Reclaim (e.g. under memcg pressure) then finds the lazyfree folio with

no dirty bit set anywhere and frees it in

__discard_anon_folio_pmd_locked(), even though the data was rewritten

after MADV_FREE; subsequent reads fault in fresh zero pages. NUMA

hinting alone can trigger the same loss, as do_huge_pmd_numa_page()

restores the PMD through pmd_modify() as well.

PMD-mapped file THPs are affected too: mprotect()/NUMA hinting dropping

the dirty bit means rewritten data is never written back.

Fix it by keeping _PAGE_DIRTY in the preserved mask, exactly like

pte_modify() and pud_modify() do. The existing

pmd_mksaveddirty()/pmd_clear_saveddirty() pair then performs the

hardware-dirty <-> saved-dirty transition based on the write bit,

preserving the shadow-stack encoding rules. (NVD)

What to Do

Monitor Linux's web page for any future patch releases.

References