linux-cve-announce - CVE-2025-38241: mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

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Message-ID: <2025070933-CVE-2025-38241-a50c@gregkh>
Date: Wed,  9 Jul 2025 12:42:33 +0200
From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
To: linux-cve-announce@...r.kernel.org
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...nel.org>
Subject: CVE-2025-38241: mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...nel.org>

Description
===========

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

Following softlockup can be easily reproduced on my test machine with:

echo always > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepages-64kB/enabled
swapon /dev/zram0 # zram0 is a 48G swap device
mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test
echo 1G > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.max
echo $BASHPID > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/cgroup.procs
while true; do
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1M count=5120
    cat /tmp/test.img > /dev/null
    rm /tmp/test.img
done

Then after a while:
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 763s! [cat:5787]
Modules linked in: zram virtiofs
CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 5787 Comm: cat Kdump: loaded Tainted: G             L      6.15.0.orig-gf3021d9246bc-dirty #118 PREEMPT(voluntary)·
Tainted: [L]=SOFTLOCKUP
Hardware name: Red Hat KVM/RHEL-AV, BIOS 0.0.0 02/06/2015
RIP: 0010:mpol_shared_policy_lookup+0xd/0x70
Code: e9 b8 b4 ff ff 31 c0 c3 cc cc cc cc 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 66 0f 1f 00 0f 1f 44 00 00 41 54 55 53 <48> 8b 1f 48 85 db 74 41 4c 8d 67 08 48 89 fb 48 89 f5 4c 89 e7 e8
RSP: 0018:ffffc90002b1fc28 EFLAGS: 00000202
RAX: 00000000001c20ca RBX: 0000000000724e1e RCX: 0000000000000001
RDX: ffff888118e214c8 RSI: 0000000000057d42 RDI: ffff888118e21518
RBP: 000000000002bec8 R08: 0000000000000001 R09: 0000000000000000
R10: 0000000000000bf4 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: 0000000000000001
R13: 00000000001c20ca R14: 00000000001c20ca R15: 0000000000000000
FS:  00007f03f995c740(0000) GS:ffff88a07ad9a000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
CR2: 00007f03f98f1000 CR3: 0000000144626004 CR4: 0000000000770eb0
DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000fffe0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
PKRU: 55555554
Call Trace:
 <TASK>
 shmem_alloc_folio+0x31/0xc0
 shmem_swapin_folio+0x309/0xcf0
 ? filemap_get_entry+0x117/0x1e0
 ? xas_load+0xd/0xb0
 ? filemap_get_entry+0x101/0x1e0
 shmem_get_folio_gfp+0x2ed/0x5b0
 shmem_file_read_iter+0x7f/0x2e0
 vfs_read+0x252/0x330
 ksys_read+0x68/0xf0
 do_syscall_64+0x4c/0x1c0
 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e
RIP: 0033:0x7f03f9a46991
Code: 00 48 8b 15 81 14 10 00 f7 d8 64 89 02 b8 ff ff ff ff eb bd e8 20 ad 01 00 f3 0f 1e fa 80 3d 35 97 10 00 00 74 13 31 c0 0f 05 <48> 3d 00 f0 ff ff 77 4f c3 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 55 48 89 e5 48 83 ec
RSP: 002b:00007fff3c52bd28 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000000
RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 0000000000040000 RCX: 00007f03f9a46991
RDX: 0000000000040000 RSI: 00007f03f98ba000 RDI: 0000000000000003
RBP: 00007fff3c52bd50 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: 00007f03f9b9a380
R10: 0000000000000022 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 0000000000040000
R13: 00007f03f98ba000 R14: 0000000000000003 R15: 0000000000000000
 </TASK>

The reason is simple, readahead brought some order 0 folio in swap cache,
and the swapin mTHP folio being allocated is in conflict with it, so
swapcache_prepare fails and causes shmem_swap_alloc_folio to return
-EEXIST, and shmem simply retries again and again causing this loop.

Fix it by applying a similar fix for anon mTHP swapin.

The performance change is very slight, time of swapin 10g zero folios
with shmem (test for 12 times):
Before:  2.47s
After:   2.48s

[kasong@...cent.com: add comment]

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2025-38241 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Issue introduced in 6.14 with commit 1dd44c0af4fa1e80a4e82faa10cbf5d22da40362 and fixed in 6.15.5 with commit 1283dfc1e0cd52cf525c2cb1b59a6f9183aab7ca
	Issue introduced in 6.14 with commit 1dd44c0af4fa1e80a4e82faa10cbf5d22da40362 and fixed in 6.16-rc4 with commit a05dd8ae5cbb1cb45f349922cfea4f548a5e5d6f

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2025-38241
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	mm/memory.c
	mm/shmem.c
	mm/swap.h


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1283dfc1e0cd52cf525c2cb1b59a6f9183aab7ca
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a05dd8ae5cbb1cb45f349922cfea4f548a5e5d6f