published September 16, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: s390: Free guest debug data on vcpu destroy
kvm_s390_clear_bp_data() is only called from
kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl_set_guest_debug(), i.e. when user space changes or
disables debugging. A vCPU that is destroyed while hardware breakpoints
are still armed - the normal case when the VMM just exits or crashes -
leaks hw_bp_info, hw_wp_info and all old_data buffers, since generic KVM
frees the vCPU right after kvm_arch_vcpu_destroy().
That is bounded by MAX_BP_COUNT entries, so roughly 8 KiB per vCPU, but
it is unbounded over VM lifetimes. The allocations are
GFP_KERNEL_ACCOUNT, so the charge also outlives the exiting process and
pins dying memcgs.
Fix by clearing the debug data on vCPU destruction. Calling it
unconditionally is fine: struct kvm_vcpu is zero allocated, so for a vCPU
that never enabled debugging the counters are 0 and the pointers NULL.