Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98468
Go to dashboardA race between memory migration and KVM stage 2 page table teardown on arm64 triggers a kernel WARN_ON, but the race is handled correctly. The sources describe a spurious warning, not memory corruption or code execution.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Hosts running the Linux kernel with KVM on arm64 that run nested guests under memory pressure and compaction may log the warning. The sources do not describe a data path to an attacker. Teams not running KVM on arm64 can skip it.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
Each row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: arm64: Fix spurious warning for benign stage 2 teardown race
kvmtool was used to establish an L1 guest with 8 CPUs and 8 GiB of RAM, an L2 guest with 4 CPUs and 4 GiB of RAM and an L3 guest with 2 CPUs and 2 GiB of RAM, all of which was then exited.
Under memory pressure in the L0 host warnings were observed due to migration triggered by compaction:
WARNING: arch/arm64/kvm/mmu.c:336 at __unmap_stage2_range+0x64/0x80, CPU#5: kcompactd0/66
Which was, in turn, triggered by an MMU notifier for the host invalidation:
mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start() -> ... -> kvm_mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start() -> kvm_mmu_unmap_gfn_range() -> kvm_unmap_gfn_range() -> kvm_nested_s2_unmap() -> kvm_stage2_unmap_range() -> __unmap_stage2_range() -> stage2_apply_range() <- -EINVAL, triggering a WARN_ON()
Racing with L0's teardown of stage 2 page tables:
exit_mm() -> mmput() -> __mmput() -> exit_mmap() -> mmu_notifier_release() -> ... -> kvm_mmu_notifier_release() -> kvm_flush_shadow_all() -> kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all() -> kvm_free_stage2_pgd() -> [ acquire kvm->mmu_lock for write ] -> mmu->pgt = NULL [ among other tasks ] -> [ release kvm->mmu_lock for write ]
It turns out there is a benign race resulting in a spurious warning:
Thread A - notify: migration | Thread B - notify: release
-------------------------------|---------------------------------
< kvm->mmu_lock held > |
stage2_apply_range() |
get mmu->pgt, check !NULL |
... | kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all()
cond_resched_rwlock_write(); | < contend, sleep kvm->mmu_lock >
< drop kvm->mmu_lock > | < acquire kvm->mmu_lock>
| ...
| kvm_free_stage2_pgd()
| mmu->pgt = NULL
| < invalidate MMU >
| ...
| < release kvm->mmu_lock >
[ scheduled ] |
stage2_apply_range() |
< loop to next > |
get, mmu->pgt, check !NULL |
is NULL, return -EINVAL |
__unmap_stage2_range() |
WARN_ON(-EINVAL) <--- entirely spurious - the race was handled
correctly.
Fix the spurious warning by updating stage2_apply_range() to no longer treat concurrent PGT teardown on lock release as an error - whether the walker is tearing down page tables or doing something else this is a legitimate reason to abort the operation without error.
This keeps the warning in place for all other circumstances.
In practice only __unmap_stage2_range() actually does anything with the error so this only impacts that.
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