CVE-2026-46029 — mm/slab: return NULL early from kmalloc_nolock() in NMI on UP

Affected: Linux

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

mm/slab: return NULL early from kmalloc_nolock() in NMI on UP

On UP kernels (!CONFIG_SMP), spin_trylock() is a no-op that unconditionally succeeds even when the lock is already held. As a result, kmalloc_nolock() called from NMI context can re-enter the slab allocator and acquire n->list_lock that the interrupted context is already holding, corrupting slab state.

With CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK on UP, the following BUG is triggered with the slub_kunit test module:

BUG: spinlock trylock failure on UP on CPU#0, kunit_try_catch/243 [...] Call Trace: <NMI> dump_stack_lvl+0x3f/0x60 do_raw_spin_trylock+0x41/0x50 _raw_spin_trylock+0x24/0x50 get_from_partial_node+0x120/0x4d0 ___slab_alloc+0x8a/0x4c0 kmalloc_nolock_noprof+0x164/0x310 [...] </NMI>

Fix this by returning NULL early when invoked from NMI on a UP kernel.

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CVE-2026-46029 — mm/slab: return NULL early from kmalloc_nolock() in NMI on UP