Critical · published September 16, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: arm64: Handle negative S1 walk levels in VNCR TLB size evaluation
Computing the effects of a TLB invalidation involves looking at
the size of the mapping cached by the TLB. For S1 mappings such as
VNCR, this is deducted from the combination of the base granule size
and the mapping level.
However, this implies that the S1 MMU is *on*. When the MMU is off,
we indicate this with the level being set to a "creative" value of
-127 (S1_MMU_DISABLED).
This ends-up being misinterpreted by pgshift_level_to_ttl() as it
doesn't handle negative levels at all (the level is immediately cast
to a u8 and only the bottom two bits considered), leading to an
invalidation size of 0. Not helpful.
Tidy-up pgshift_level_to_ttl() to handle these negative levels, and
ttl_to_size() to always return SZ_1G when no valid TTL is present.
This allows the removal of open-coded checks for similar situations.
Note that the check for a negative value not explicitely checking for
S1_MMU_DISABLED is deliberate, so that actual negative levels introduced
with LVA2 and D128 can take the same path if we ever support them.