published December 16, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
vmw_balloon: indicate success when effectively deflating during migration
When migrating a balloon page, we first deflate the old page to then
inflate the new page.
However, if inflating the new page succeeded, we effectively deflated the
old page, reducing the balloon size.
In that case, the migration actually worked: similar to migrating+
immediately deflating the new page. The old page will be freed back to
the buddy.
Right now, the core will leave the page be marked as isolated (as we
returned an error). When later trying to putback that page, we will run
into the WARN_ON_ONCE() in balloon_page_putback().
That handling was changed in commit 3544c4faccb8 ("mm/balloon_compaction:
stop using __ClearPageMovable()"); before that change, we would have
tolerated that way of handling it.
To fix it, let's just return 0 in that case, making the core effectively
just clear the "isolated" flag + freeing it back to the buddy as if the
migration succeeded. Note that the new page will also get freed when the
core puts the last reference.
Note that this also makes it all be more consistent: we will no longer
unisolate the page in the balloon driver while keeping it marked as being
isolated in migration core.
This was found by code inspection.