published September 4, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/hugetlb: fix swap entry corruption when clearing uffd-wp at fork()
copy_hugetlb_page_range() clears the uffd-wp bit of migration and hwpoison
entries with huge_pte_clear_uffd_wp(), which operates on the present-PTE
bit position. Swap entries keep the uffd-wp state elsewhere -- the
migration branch reads and sets it with pte_swp_uffd_wp() and
pte_swp_mkuffd_wp() -- and the present-PTE position falls into the swap
payload. On x86-64 it lands in the inverted swap offset, where a
naturally-aligned hugetlb PFN always has the affected bit set, so the
clear advances the encoded PFN by two pages.
No userfaultfd needs to be involved: the clear is guarded only by the
child VMA not being uffd-wp registered, so a plain fork() with an
in-flight hugetlb migration entry (or a poisoned hugetlb page) corrupts
the entry copied into the child. Instrumenting the clear and forking
after MADV_HWPOISON on a 2MB anon hugetlb page shows:
offset before=120e00
offset after =120e02
The fallout is mostly latent: rmap walks match migration entries by folio
range and remove_migration_pte() rebuilds the PTE from the folio, so a
within-folio PFN skew heals once migration completes. But any path that
re-encodes the corrupted offset -- e.g. hugetlb_change_protection()
rewriting a writable migration entry via
make_readable_migration_entry(swp_offset(entry)) -- propagates it.
Migration entries legitimately carry uffd-wp, so clear it with
pte_swp_clear_uffd_wp(), matching copy_nonpresent_pte() and
move_huge_pte().
A hwpoison entry, on the other hand, never carries the uffd-wp bit: it is
installed fresh by make_hwpoison_entry() (try_to_unmap_one() does not
preserve uffd-wp on the hwpoison path) and hugetlb_change_protection()
leaves hwpoison entries untouched. There was nothing to clear there, only
the corruption, so drop the clear entirely.