CVE-2026-74674 — mm: fix incorrect flush address in direct page table reclaim

Affected: Linux

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

mm: fix incorrect flush address in direct page table reclaim

When zap_pte_range reclaims a page table, it does:

pte_free_tlb(tlb, pmd_pgtable(pmdval), addr);

and this is unconditionally wrong: if this code executes, addr *always* points one past the end of the range covered by the table. The addr parameter is used to flush the TLB (really the paging-structure-cache) to drop references to the to-be-freed table, and any architecture that cares about the parameter will flush the wrong address. (But they'll still free the correct page).

I think it's worth contemplating why the kernel works at all.

If we hit the offending line of code, we will first clear the PMD entry (line 1954, zap_empty_pte_table), then we will issue pending flushes if force_flush is set (tlb_flush_mmu_tlbonly(tlb)), then we will skip the retry on line 1979 (phew!), and then we will do the offending pte_free_tlb call. *Or* we will clear the PMD entry immediately before pte_free_tlb (line 1983, zap_pte_table_if_empty).

If we have any pending flushes (i.e. we actually zapped any last-level entries) at the time we clear the PMD entry, then the flush really ought to flush all references to the table (Linus certainly seems to think it will on all architectures [0]).

The condition under which we have no accumulated flushes at the time of the clear is very complex (the whole zap_pte_range function has absurdly complex control flow).…

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CVE-2026-74674 — mm: fix incorrect flush address in direct page table reclaim