CVE-2025-38084

high

Published 2025-08-18 · Modified 2025-08-22

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

8.0

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/hugetlb: unshare page tables during VMA split, not before Currently, __split_vma() triggers hugetlb page table unsharing through vm_ops->may_split(). This happens before the VMA lock and rmap locks are taken - which is too early, it allows racing VMA-locked page faults in our process and racing rmap walks from other processes to cause page tables to be shared again before we actually perform the split. Fix it by explicitly calling into the hugetlb unshare logic from __split_vma() in the same place where THP splitting also happens. At that point, both the VMA and the rmap(s) are write-locked. An annoying detail is that we can now call into the helper hugetlb_unshare_pmds() from two different locking contexts: 1. from hugetlb_split(), holding: - mmap lock (exclusively) - VMA lock - file rmap lock (exclusively) 2. hugetlb_unshare_all_pmds(), which I think is designed to be able to call us with only the mmap lock held (in shared mode), but currently only runs while holding mmap lock (exclusively) and VMA lock Backporting note: This commit fixes a racy protection that was introduced in commit b30c14cd6102 ("hugetlb: unshare some PMDs when splitting VMAs"); that commit claimed to fix an issue introduced in 5.13, but it should actually also go all the way back. [jannh@google.com: v2]

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

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OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
rhel	9	fixed
sles		affected
debian	bookworm	fixed	`6.1.147-1`
debian	bullseye	fixed	`5.10.244-1`
debian	forky	fixed	`6.12.35-1`
debian	sid	fixed	`6.12.35-1`
debian	trixie	fixed	`6.12.35-1`
almalinux	9	fixed	`kernel-debug-devel-5.14.0-570.35.1.el9_6.aarch64.rpm`

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.