CVE-2025-40199: page_pool: Fix PP_MAGIC_MASK to avoid crashing on some 32-bit arches

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 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: 2025-11-12 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: page_pool: Fix PP_MAGIC_MASK to avoid crashing on some 32-bit arches Helge reported that the introduction of PP_MAGIC_MASK let to crashes on boot on his 32-bit parisc machine. The cause of this is the mask is set too wide, so the page_pool_page_is_pp() incurs false positives which crashes the machine. Just disabling the check in page_pool_is_pp() will lead to the page_pool code itself malfunctioning; so instead of doing this, this patch changes the define for PP_DMA_INDEX_BITS to avoid mistaking arbitrary kernel pointers for page_pool-tagged pages. The fix relies on the kernel pointers that alias with the pp_magic field always being above PAGE_OFFSET. With this assumption, we can use the lowest bit of the value of PAGE_OFFSET as the upper bound of the PP_DMA_INDEX_MASK, which should avoid the false positives. Because we cannot rely on PAGE_OFFSET always being a compile-time constant, nor on it always being >0, we fall back to disabling the dma_index storage when there are not enough bits available. This leaves us in the situation we were in before the patch in the Fixes tag, but only on a subset of architecture configurations. This seems to be the best we can do until the transition to page types in complete for page_pool pages. v2: - Make sure there's at least 8 bits available and that the PAGE_OFFSET bit calculation doesn't wrap

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 6.12.34 before 6.12.54; from 6.15.3 before 6.16; 6.16 — fixed in 6.12.54, 6.16, 6.18

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.12.54, 6.16, 6.18. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2025-40199 or the next vulnerability affects your stack