Affected: Linux

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

riscv: mm: Do not call pmd dtor on vmemmap page table teardown

The vmemmap's, which is used for RV64 with SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP, page tables are populated using pmd (page middle directory) hugetables. However, the pmd allocation is not using the generic mechanism used by the VMA code (e.g. pmd_alloc()), or the RISC-V specific create_pgd_mapping()/alloc_pmd_late(). Instead, the vmemmap page table code allocates a page, and calls vmemmap_set_pmd(). This results in that the pmd ctor is *not* called, nor would it make sense to do so.

Now, when tearing down a vmemmap page table pmd, the cleanup code would unconditionally, and incorrectly call the pmd dtor, which results in a crash (best case).

This issue was found when running the HMM selftests:

| tools/testing/selftests/mm# ./test_hmm.sh smoke | ... # when unloading the test_hmm.ko module | page: refcount:1 mapcount:0 mapping:0000000000000000 index:0x0 pfn:0x10915b | flags: 0x1000000000000000(node=0|zone=1) | raw: 1000000000000000 0000000000000000 dead000000000122 0000000000000000 | raw: 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 00000001ffffffff 0000000000000000 | page dumped because: VM_BUG_ON_PAGE(ptdesc->pmd_huge_pte) | ------------[ cut here ]------------ | kernel BUG at include/linux/mm.h:3080! | Kernel BUG [#1] | Modules linked in: test_hmm(-) sch_fq_codel fuse drm drm_panel_orientation_quirks backlight dm_mod | CPU: 1 UID: 0 PID: 514 Comm…