CVE-2025-39844

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

mm: move page table sync declarations to linux/pgtable.h

During our internal testing, we started observing intermittent boot

failures when the machine uses 4-level paging and has a large amount of

persistent memory:

BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: ffffe70000000034

#PF: supervisor write access in kernel mode

#PF: error_code(0x0002) - not-present page

PGD 0 P4D 0

Oops: 0002 [#1] SMP NOPTI

RIP: 0010:__init_single_page+0x9/0x6d

Call Trace:

<TASK>

__init_zone_device_page+0x17/0x5d

memmap_init_zone_device+0x154/0x1bb

pagemap_range+0x2e0/0x40f

memremap_pages+0x10b/0x2f0

devm_memremap_pages+0x1e/0x60

dev_dax_probe+0xce/0x2ec [device_dax]

dax_bus_probe+0x6d/0xc9

[... snip ...]

</TASK>

It turns out that the kernel panics while initializing vmemmap (struct

page array) when the vmemmap region spans two PGD entries, because the new

PGD entry is only installed in init_mm.pgd, but not in the page tables of

other tasks.

And looking at __populate_section_memmap():

if (vmemmap_can_optimize(altmap, pgmap))

// does not sync top level page tables

r = vmemmap_populate_compound_pages(pfn, start, end, nid, pgmap);

else

// sync top level page tables in x86

r = vmemmap_populate(start, end, nid, altmap);

In the normal path, vmemmap_populate() in arch/x86/mm/init_64.c

synchronizes the top level page table (See commit 9b861528a801 ("x86-64,

mem: Update all PGDs for direct mapping and vmemmap mapping changes")) so

that all tasks in the system can see the new vmemmap area.

However, when vmemmap_can_optimize() returns true, the optimized path

skips synchronization of top-level page tables. This is because

vmemmap_populate_compound_pages() is implemented in core MM code, which

does not handle synchronization of the top-level page tables. Instead,

the core MM has historically relied on each architecture to perform this

synchronization manually.

We're not the first party to encounter a crash caused by not-sync'd top

level page tables: earlier this year, Gwan-gyeong Mun attempted to address

the issue [1] [2] after hitting a kernel panic when x86 code accessed the

vmemmap area before the corresponding top-level entries were synced. At

that time, the issue was believed to be triggered only when struct page

was enlarged for debugging purposes, and the patch did not get further

updates.

It turns out that current approach of relying on each arch to handle the

page table sync manually is fragile because 1) it's easy to forget to sync

the top level page table, and 2) it's also easy to overlook that the

kernel should not access the vmemmap and direct mapping areas before the

sync.

# The solution: Make page table sync more code robust and harder to miss

To address this, Dave Hansen suggested [3] [4] introducing

{pgd,p4d}_populate_kernel() for updating kernel portion of the page tables

and allow each architecture to explicitly perform synchronization when

installing top-level entries. With this approach, we no longer need to

worry about missing the sync step, reducing the risk of future

regressions.

The new interface reuses existing ARCH_PAGE_TABLE_SYNC_MASK,

PGTBL_P*D_MODIFIED and arch_sync_kernel_mappings() facility used by

vmalloc and ioremap to synchronize page tables.

pgd_populate_kernel() looks like this:

static inline void pgd_populate_kernel(unsigned long addr, pgd_t *pgd,

p4d_t *p4d)

{

pgd_populate(&init_mm, pgd, p4d);

if (ARCH_PAGE_TABLE_SYNC_MASK & PGTBL_PGD_MODIFIED)

arch_sync_kernel_mappings(addr, addr);

}

It is worth noting that vmalloc() and apply_to_range() carefully

synchronizes page tables by calling p*d_alloc_track() and

arch_sync_kernel_mappings(), and thus they are not affected by

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