published September 24, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
sched/isolation: Defer freeing of cpumask memblock memory to initcall
When testing a linux-next kernel with commit 59bd1d914bb5 ("memblock:
warn when freeing reserved memory before memory map is initialized"),
the following warning was hit when there was a "nohz_full" kernel boot
parameter.
Cannot free reserved memory because of deferred initialization of the memory map
WARNING: mm/memblock.c:904 at __free_reserved_area+0xde/0xf0, CPU#0: swapper/0/0
:
Call Trace:
<TASK>
memblock_phys_free+0xcb/0x100
housekeeping_init+0x14c/0x170
start_kernel+0x207/0x450
x86_64_start_reservations+0x24/0x30
x86_64_start_kernel+0xda/0xe0
common_startup_64+0x13e/0x141
</TASK>
IOW, we shouldn't free memblock allocated memory so early
in the boot process when memory map isn't fully initialized in
deferred_init_memmap().
Fix it by saving the housekeeping cpumask memblock memory to be
freed into a llist free list in housekeeping_init() and add a new
housekeeping_late_init() helper to defer the actual freeing of memblock
memory to when initcall's are being processed. The cpumask memblock
memory is treated as a llist_node with the size of a "long" type which
is also smallest cpumask size that can be allocated.
The non-atomic version of the llist APIs are used as there is no
contention.
This commit depends on the presence of commit 7c2eee9c1367 ("memblock:
don't touch memblock arrays when memblock_free() is called late")
to prevent a KASAN UAF bug report [1].
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/