CVE-2022-50446: ARC: mm: fix leakage of memory allocated for PTE

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2025-10-01 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-401

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ARC: mm: fix leakage of memory allocated for PTE Since commit d9820ff ("ARC: mm: switch pgtable_t back to struct page *") a memory leakage problem occurs. Memory allocated for page table entries not released during process termination. This issue can be reproduced by a small program that allocates a large amount of memory. After several runs, you'll see that the amount of free memory has reduced and will continue to reduce after each run. All ARC CPUs are effected by this issue. The issue was introduced since the kernel stable release v5.15-rc1. As described in commit d9820ff after switch pgtable_t back to struct page *, a pointer to "struct page" and appropriate functions are used to allocate and free a memory page for PTEs, but the pmd_pgtable macro hasn't changed and returns the direct virtual address from the PMD (PGD) entry. Than this address used as a parameter in the __pte_free() and as a result this function couldn't release memory page allocated for PTEs. Fix this issue by changing the pmd_pgtable macro and returning pointer to struct page.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 5.15 before 5.15.77; from 5.16 before 6.0.7; 6.1-rc1, 6.1-rc2 — fixed in 5.15.77, 6.0.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.15.77, 6.0.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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