Medium [CVE-2026-53342] call pagetable dtor when freeing hot-removed page tables
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-53342.
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Summary
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: arm64: mm: call pagetable dtor when freeing hot-removed page tables Since 5e8eb9aeeda3 ("arm64: mm: always call PTE/PMD ctor in __create_pgd_mapping()") page-table allocation on ARM64 always calls pagetable_{pte,pmd,pud,p4d}_ctor().
This sets the page_type to PGTY_table, increments NR_PAGETABLE and possible allocates a PTL. However the matching pagetable_dtor() calls were never added.
With DEBUG_VM enabled on kernel versions prior to v6.17 without 2dfcd1608f3a9 ("mm/page_alloc: let page freeing clear any set page type") this leads to the following warning when freeing these pages due to page->page_type sharing page->_mapcount: BUG: Bad page state in process... pfn:284fbb page: refcount:0 mapcount:0 mapping:0000000000000000 index:0x0 pfn:0x284fbb flags: 0x17fffc000000000(node=0|zone=2|lastcpupid=0x1ffff) page_type: f2(table) page dumped because: nonzero mapcount Call trace: bad_page+0x13c/0x160 __free_frozen_pages+0x6cc/0x860 ___free_pages+0xf4/0x180 free_pages+0x54/0x80 free_hotplug_page_range.part.0+0x58/0x90 free_empty_tables+0x438/0x500 __remove_pgd_mapping.constprop.0+0x60/0xa8 arch_remove_memory+0x48/0x80 try_remove_memory+0x158/0x1d8 offline_and_remove_memory+0x138/0x180 It can also lead to leaking the ptl allocation if ALLOC_SPLIT_PTLOCKS is defined and incorrect NR_PAGETABLE stats.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 9 days ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 9 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation
The source record does not include mitigation steps. That is not a statement that no fix exists — read the vendor advisory below for the authoritative guidance.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 9 days ago·verify at source
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