CVE-2026-23375

medium Red Hat
CVSS v3 Base Score
7.0
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score
0.0%
Exploitation probability in 30 days
Top 96% most likely to be exploited
Attack Characteristics
Attack Vector
Local
Attack Complexity
High
Privileges Required
Low
User Interaction
None
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High
Published: March 25, 2026 (50 days ago)
Last Modified: March 25, 2026
Vendor: Red Hat
Source: REDHAT

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm: thp: deny THP for files on anonymous inodes file_thp_enabled() incorrectly allows THP for files on anonymous inodes (e.g. guest_memfd and secretmem). These files are created via alloc_file_pseudo(), which does not call get_write_access() and leaves inode->i_writecount at 0. Combined with S_ISREG(inode->i_mode) being true, they appear as read-only regular files when CONFIG_READ_ONLY_THP_FOR_FS is enabled, making them eligible for THP collapse. Anonymous inodes can never pass the inode_is_open_for_write() check since their i_writecount is never incremented through the normal VFS open path. The right thing to do is to exclude them from THP eligibility altogether, since CONFIG_READ_ONLY_THP_FOR_FS was designed for real filesystem files (e.g. shared libraries), not for pseudo-filesystem inodes. For guest_memfd, this allows khugepaged and MADV_COLLAPSE to create large folios in the page cache via the collapse path, but the guest_memfd fault handler does not support large folios. This triggers WARN_ON_ONCE(folio_test_large(folio)) in kvm_gmem_fault_user_mapping(). For secretmem, collapse_file() tries to copy page contents through the direct map, but secretmem pages are removed from the direct map. This can result in a kernel crash: BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: ffff88810284d000 RIP: 0010:memcpy_orig+0x16/0x130 Call Trace: collapse_file hpage_collapse_scan_file madvise_collapse Secretmem is not affected by the crash on upstream as the memory failure recovery handles the failed copy gracefully, but it still triggers confusing false memory failure reports: Memory failure: 0x106d96f: recovery action for clean unevictable LRU page: Recovered Check IS_ANON_FILE(inode) in file_thp_enabled() to deny THP for all anonymous inode files.

CWE

CWE-825

Affected Products

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

References