Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
hugetlbfs: don’t delete error page from pagecache
This change is very similar to the change that was made for shmem [1], and it solves the same problem but for HugeTLBFS instead.
Currently, when poison is found in a HugeTLB page, the page is removed from the page cache. That means that attempting to map or read that hugepage in the future will result in a new hugepage being allocated instead of notifying the user that the page was poisoned. As [1] states, this is effectively memory corruption.
The fix is to leave the page in the page cache. If the user attempts to use a poisoned HugeTLB page with a syscall, the syscall will fail with EIO, the same error code that shmem uses. For attempts to map the page, the thread will get a BUS_MCEERR_AR SIGBUS.
[1]: commit a76054266661 (“mm: shmem: don’t truncate page if memory failure happens”)
Details
- Affected product:
- AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , CentOS 6 ELS , CentOS 7 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , CloudLinux 6 ELS , CloudLinux 7 ELS , Oracle Linux 6 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , RHEL 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS
- Affected packages:
- kernel @ 2.6.32 (+16 more)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
hugetlbfs: don’t delete error page from pagecache
This change is very similar to the change that was made for shmem [1], and it solves the same problem but for HugeTLBFS instead.
Currently, when poison is found in a HugeTLB page, the page is removed from the page cache. That means that attempting to map or read that hugepage in the future will result in a new hugepage being allocated instead of notifying the user that the page was poisoned. As [1] states, this is effectively memory corruption.
The fix is to leave the page in the page cache. If the user attempts to use a poisoned HugeTLB page with a syscall, the syscall will fail with EIO, the same error code that shmem uses. For attempts to map the page, the thread will get a BUS_MCEERR_AR SIGBUS.
[1]: commit a76054266661 (“mm: shmem: don’t truncate page if memory failure happens”)