CVE-2026-46035: mm/page_alloc: return NULL early from alloc_frozen_pages_nolock() in NMI on UP

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-05-27 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/page_alloc: return NULL early from alloc_frozen_pages_nolock() in NMI on UP On UP kernels (!CONFIG_SMP), spin_trylock() is a no-op that unconditionally succeeds even when the lock is already held. As a result, alloc_frozen_pages_nolock() called from NMI context can re-enter rmqueue() and acquire the zone lock that the interrupted context is already holding, corrupting the freelists. With CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK on UP, the following BUG is triggered with the slub_kunit test module: BUG: spinlock trylock failure on UP on CPU#0, kunit_try_catch/243 [...] Call Trace: <NMI> dump_stack_lvl+0x3f/0x60 do_raw_spin_trylock+0x41/0x50 _raw_spin_trylock+0x24/0x50 rmqueue.isra.0+0x2a9/0xa70 get_page_from_freelist+0xeb/0x450 alloc_frozen_pages_nolock_noprof+0x111/0x1e0 allocate_slab+0x42a/0x500 ___slab_alloc+0xa7/0x4c0 kmalloc_nolock_noprof+0x164/0x310 [...] </NMI> Fix this by returning NULL early when invoked from NMI on a UP kernel.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 6.18 before 6.18.27; from 6.19 before 7.0.4; 7.1-rc1 — fixed in 6.18.27, 7.0.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18.27, 7.0.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-46035 or the next vulnerability affects your stack