CVE-2024-35846: mm: zswap: fix shrinker NULL crash with cgroup_disable=memory

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: 2024-05-17 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm: zswap: fix shrinker NULL crash with cgroup_disable=memory Christian reports a NULL deref in zswap that he bisected down to the zswap shrinker. The issue also cropped up in the bug trackers of libguestfs [1] and the Red Hat bugzilla [2]. The problem is that when memcg is disabled with the boot time flag, the zswap shrinker might get called with sc->memcg == NULL. This is okay in many places, like the lruvec operations. But it crashes in memcg_page_state() - which is only used due to the non-node accounting of cgroup's the zswap memory to begin with. Nhat spotted that the memcg can be NULL in the memcg-disabled case, and I was then able to reproduce the crash locally as well. [1] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/139 [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2275252

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 6.8 before 6.8.9; 6.9-rc1, 6.9-rc2, 6.9-rc3, 6.9-rc4, 6.9-rc5 — fixed in 6.8.9

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.8.9. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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