In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been...
Moderate severity
Unreviewed
Published
Oct 15, 2024
to the GitHub Advisory Database
•
Updated Oct 21, 2024
Description
Published by the National Vulnerability Database
Oct 15, 2024
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database
Oct 15, 2024
Last updated
Oct 21, 2024
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm: avoid leaving partial pfn mappings around in error case
As Jann points out, PFN mappings are special, because unlike normal
memory mappings, there is no lifetime information associated with the
mapping - it is just a raw mapping of PFNs with no reference counting of
a 'struct page'.
That's all very much intentional, but it does mean that it's easy to
mess up the cleanup in case of errors. Yes, a failed mmap() will always
eventually clean up any partial mappings, but without any explicit
lifetime in the page table mapping itself, it's very easy to do the
error handling in the wrong order.
In particular, it's easy to mistakenly free the physical backing store
before the page tables are actually cleaned up and (temporarily) have
stale dangling PTE entries.
To make this situation less error-prone, just make sure that any partial
pfn mapping is torn down early, before any other error handling.
References