published September 12, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/mglru: fix and remove redundant unevictable folio handling
sort_folio() has a shortcut for moving folios that are no longer evictable
but are still sitting on a generation list. However, this shortcut is
buggy. It does not follow the PG_lru usage convention, and it has a more
serious issue.
Unevictable folios are not threaded on lists[LRU_UNEVICTABLE], so that
folio->lru can be reused to hold folio->mlock_count (see the comment in
lruvec_init()). Hence lruvec_add_folio() skips the list_add() for them,
and every other place that turns a folio unevictable initialises
mlock_count explicitly: lru_add() sets it to 0, __mlock_folio() and
__mlock_new_folio() set it to !!folio_test_mlocked(folio). sort_folio()
sets nothing, and the lru_gen_del_folio() right above it may have already
poisoned folio->lru via list_del(), so mlock_count ends up aliasing
LIST_POISON2, which reads as 0x122, i.e. 290. The result is user
visible. On munlock, __munlock_folio() decrements that bogus count, finds
it still non-zero and bails out before clearing PG_mlocked, so the folio
remains unevictable and the Mlocked accounting stays inflated until the
folio is freed.
The shortcut also touches the LRU flags in the wrong order. It calls
lru_gen_del_folio() while PG_lru is still set, so a concurrent
folio_test_clear_lru() (e.g. compaction, folio_isolate_lru()) can succeed
on a folio that has already been taken off the generation list, which may
lead to unexpected behavior.
So fix it by isolating them as common folios and letting the generic
shrink path cull them. This matches the classical LRU behavior, and there
should be no visible effect on the generic eviction or isolation behavior.
There is no performance concern either, such a folio goes through this
once, and then it is off the generation lists for good.