CVE-2026-89986: mm/mempolicy: fix sleeping allocation in alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave()

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: 2026-09-16 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/mempolicy: fix sleeping allocation in alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave() syzbot reported a sleeping function called from invalid context splat in bucket_table_alloc(). When rhashtable_insert_slow() rehashes the table under rcu_read_lock(), it calls bucket_table_alloc(..., GFP_ATOMIC | __GFP_NOWARN). If the bucket table allocation uses vmalloc, __vmalloc_node_range_noprof() invokes vm_area_alloc_pages() -> alloc_pages_bulk_mempolicy_noprof() with the passed GFP_ATOMIC flags. If the current task has an MPOL_WEIGHTED_INTERLEAVE mempolicy, alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave() is called and currently hardcodes GFP_KERNEL when allocating the temporary weights array, triggering a might_alloc() splat in atomic/RCU contexts. Pass the gfp flags (masked with GFP_RECLAIM_MASK to strip page-allocator zone modifiers like __GFP_HIGHMEM) received by alloc_pages_bulk_weighted_interleave() to kmalloc() instead of hardcoding GFP_KERNEL. Since the weights buffer is immediately initialized in full, kmalloc() is sufficient.

Affected products

Linux kernel: 6.9 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-89986 or the next vulnerability affects your stack