High · published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/hugetlb: fix list corruption in allocate_file_region_entries()
allocate_file_region_entries() tops up resv->region_cache with freshly
allocated file_region descriptors. The allocation uses GFP_KERNEL, so
resv->lock is dropped around it: the new entries are gathered on a
stack-local list head, allocated_regions, and spliced into
resv->region_cache once the lock is re-acquired.
The splice used list_splice(), which moves the entries but does not
re-initialize the source head, so allocated_regions is left pointing at an
entry that now lives on resv->region_cache. The top-up runs in a while
loop that re-checks the cache deficit after re-acquiring the lock. For a
shared mapping the resv_map is shared by every mapper of the hugetlbfs
inode, so a concurrent region_chg()/region_add()/region_del() on the same
resv_map can consume cache entries during the unlocked window and force a
second iteration. That iteration calls list_add() on the stale head and
corrupts the list; with CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST the __list_add_valid() check
trips:
list_add corruption. next->prev should be prev (ffffc900011ff7f8),
but was ffff88814c281460. (next=ffff88814c545640).
kernel BUG at lib/list_debug.c:31!
allocate_file_region_entries+0x191/0x420
region_chg+0x267/0x300
hugetlb_reserve_pages+0x387/0xc80
hugetlbfs_file_mmap+0x2ce/0x3f0
mmap_region+0x1348/0x1a80
do_mmap+0x85e/0xb90
vm_mmap_pgoff+0x18c/0x330
ksys_mmap_pgoff+0x2a1/0x3e0
do_syscall_64+0xd7/0x420
Without CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST the bad list_add() silently links a kernel-stack
address into resv->region_cache, leading to later use-after-free.
This was observed as a real host panic on a dense KVM host where a QEMU
guest-RAM hugetlbfs file was mapped MAP_SHARED by both QEMU and a separate
SPDK/DPDK vhost-user target, generating concurrent region_* traffic on one
shared resv_map.
Use list_splice_init() so the source head is re-initialized empty after
each splice, making the retry loop safe.