CVE-2025-38008 — mm/page_alloc: fix race condition in unaccepted memory handling

Affected: Linux

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

mm/page_alloc: fix race condition in unaccepted memory handling

The page allocator tracks the number of zones that have unaccepted memory using static_branch_enc/dec() and uses that static branch in hot paths to determine if it needs to deal with unaccepted memory.

Borislav and Thomas pointed out that the tracking is racy: operations on static_branch are not serialized against adding/removing unaccepted pages to/from the zone.

Sanity checks inside static_branch machinery detects it:

WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 10 at kernel/jump_label.c:276 __static_key_slow_dec_cpuslocked+0x8e/0xa0

The comment around the WARN() explains the problem:

/* * Warn about the '-1' case though; since that means a * decrement is concurrent with a first (0->1) increment. IOW * people are trying to disable something that wasn't yet fully * enabled. This suggests an ordering problem on the user side. */

The effect of this static_branch optimization is only visible on microbenchmark.

Instead of adding more complexity around it, remove it altogether.

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CVE-2025-38008 — mm/page_alloc: fix race condition in unaccepted memory handling