published September 24, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/hugetlb: fix boot panic with CONFIG_DEBUG_VM and HVO bootmem pages
Patch series "mm: Refactor bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation", v4.
This series is split out from the earlier larger series "mm: Generalize
HVO for HugeTLB and device DAX" [1]. It collects the first 19 patches of
that series as a standalone set of fixes and preparatory cleanups around
bootmem HugeTLB handling, sparse initialization ordering, and related
vmemmap setup.
The first patches fix a few bugs found while reviewing the existing code,
including incorrect bootmem HVO handling, wrong vmemmap registration
arguments, a powerpc compound-vmemmap tracking bug, and too-late
initialization of gigantic bootmem HugeTLB struct pages.
The rest of the series reorders early memory initialization so the
relevant zone state is available before sparse and HugeTLB boot-time setup
runs, then simplifies the remaining bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation
path and removes code made obsolete by that rework.
At a high level:
- patches [1-4] fix boot-time and arch-specific bugs
- patches [5-12] reorder and simplify sparse/mm/hugetlb early init
- patches [13-19] refactor bootmem gigantic hugepage allocation and
remove obsolete helpers and state
This patch (of 19):
Commit 622026e87c40 ("mm/hugetlb: remove fake head pages") switched
HVO to reuse per-zone shared tail pages from zone->vmemmap_tails[].
Those shared tail pages were initialized in hugetlb_vmemmap_init(), but
bootmem HugeTLB folios are prepared earlier from
gather_bootmem_prealloc(). With hugetlb_free_vmemmap=on,
prep_and_add_bootmem_folios() can access pageblock flags on bootmem
HugeTLB pages whose mirrored tail struct pages already point to the shared
tail page. On CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels, get_pfnblock_bitmap_bitidx() then
dereferences the still-uninitialized shared tail page and can panic during
boot.
Initialize zone->vmemmap_tails[] from gather_bootmem_prealloc(), before
bootmem HugeTLB folios are processed, and drop the later initialization
from hugetlb_vmemmap_init().
This bug only affects CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels, where the relevant
assertion is evaluated.