What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-31397: mm/huge_memory: fix use of NULL folio in move_pages_huge_pmd()

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/huge_memory: fix use of NULL folio in move_pages_huge_pmd() move_pages_huge_pmd() handles UFFDIO_MOVE for both normal THPs and huge zero pages. For the huge zero page path, src_folio is explicitly set to NULL, and is used as a sentinel to skip folio operations like lock and rmap. In the huge zero page branch, src_folio is NULL, so folio_mk_pmd(NULL, pgprot) passes NULL through folio_pfn() and page_to_pfn(). With SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP this silently produces a bogus PFN, installing a PMD pointing to non-existent physical memory. On other memory models it is a NULL dereference. Use page_folio(src_page) to obtain the valid huge zero folio from the page, which was obtained from pmd_page() and remains valid throughout. After commit d82d09e48219 ("mm/huge_memory: mark PMD mappings of the huge zero folio special"), moved huge zero PMDs must remain special so vm_normal_page_pmd() continues to treat them as special mappings. move_pages_huge_pmd() currently reconstructs the destination PMD in the huge zero page branch, which drops PMD state such as pmd_special() on architectures with CONFIG_ARCH_HAS_PTE_SPECIAL. As a result, vm_normal_page_pmd() can treat the moved huge zero PMD as a normal page and corrupt its refcount. Instead of reconstructing the PMD from the folio, derive the destination entry from src_pmdval after pmdp_huge_clear_flush(), then handle the PMD metadata the same way move_huge_pmd() does for moved entries by marking it soft-dirty and clearing uffd-wp.

Affected products

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18.20, 6.19.10. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-31397 or the next vulnerability affects your stack