Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
x86/mm: Check return value from memblock_phys_alloc_range()
At least with CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START=0x100000, if there is < 4 MiB of contiguous free memory available at this point, the kernel will crash and burn because memblock_phys_alloc_range() returns 0 on failure, which leads memblock_phys_free() to throw the first 4 MiB of physical memory to the wolves.
At a minimum it should fail gracefully with a meaningful diagnostic, but in fact everything seems to work fine without the weird reserve allocation.
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 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:
- linux-hwe @ 4.15.0 (+15 more)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
x86/mm: Check return value from memblock_phys_alloc_range()
At least with CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START=0x100000, if there is < 4 MiB of contiguous free memory available at this point, the kernel will crash and burn because memblock_phys_alloc_range() returns 0 on failure, which leads memblock_phys_free() to throw the first 4 MiB of physical memory to the wolves.
At a minimum it should fail gracefully with a meaningful diagnostic, but in fact everything seems to work fine without the weird reserve allocation.