High · published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
LoongArch: Fix missing dirty page tracking in {pte,pmd}_wrprotect()
When hardware page table walker (PTW) is enabled on LoongArch, the CPU
may set _PAGE_DIRTY directly in the page table entry during a write TLB
miss, without going through the software TLB store handler. The software
TLB store handler (tlbex.S:254) sets both _PAGE_DIRTY and_PAGE_MODIFIED
together:
ori t0, t0, (_PAGE_VALID | _PAGE_DIRTY | _PAGE_MODIFIED)
Since hardware PTW only sets _PAGE_DIRTY, the software-only bit, i.e.
_PAGE_MODIFIED is left unchanged. This creates a window where a PTE has
_PAGE_DIRTY set (hardware knows the page is dirty) but _PAGE_MODIFIED
clear (software is unaware).
When fork()/clone() triggers copy-on-write, __copy_present_ptes() calls
pte_wrprotect(), which unconditionally clears both the _PAGE_WRITE and
_PAGE_DIRTY bits:
pte_val(pte) &= ~(_PAGE_WRITE | _PAGE_DIRTY);
Since _PAGE_MODIFIED was never set, the dirtiness information is lost
completely. Subsequently, when memory pressure triggers page reclaim,
page_mkclean() / try_to_unmap() sees the page as clean (i.e. pte_dirty()
returns false) and the page may be freed without writeback, causing data
corruption.
Fix this by propagating the _PAGE_DIRTY bit to the _PAGE_MODIFIED bit in
both pte_wrprotect() and pmd_wrprotect() before clearing writeable bits:
if (pte_val(pte) & _PAGE_DIRTY)
pte_val(pte) |= _PAGE_MODIFIED;
The pmd_wrprotect() fix handles the CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE case,
where pmd entries need the same treatment.
This ensures the software dirty tracking bit (checked by pte_dirty() and
pmd_dirty(), which read both the _PAGE_DIRTY and _PAGE_MODIFIED bits) is
preserved across fork COW write-protection.
The issue was found by the LTP madvise09 test case, which exercises page
reclaim after "madvise(MADV_FREE), write and fork" operation sequence on
private anonymous mappings.