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Medium5.5Red Hat Linux

Medium [CVE-2026-64130] fix initialization of tags of the huge zero folio with init_on_free

This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-64130 affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat package: kernel.

CVE-2026-64130 Published Jul 19, 2026Updated by vendor Jul 19, 2026
Affected products & platforms
Red Hat LinuxLinux Kernel
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Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/page_alloc: fix initialization of tags of the huge zero folio with init_on_free __GFP_ZEROTAGS semantics are currently a bit weird, but effectively this flag is only ever set alongside __GFP_ZERO and __GFP_SKIP_KASAN.

If we run with init_on_free, we will zero out pages during __free_pages_prepare(), to skip zeroing on the allocation path. However, when allocating with __GFP_ZEROTAG set, post_alloc_hook() will consequently not only skip clearing page content, but also skip clearing tag memory.

Not clearing tags through __GFP_ZEROTAGS is irrelevant for most pages that will get mapped to user space through set_pte_at() later: set_pte_at() and friends will detect that the tags have not been initialized yet (PG_mte_tagged not set), and initialize them.

However, for the huge zero folio, which will be mapped through a PMD marked as special, this initialization will not be performed, ending up exposing whatever tags were still set for the pages. The docs (Documentation/arch/arm64/memory-tagging-extension.rst) state that allocation tags are set to 0 when a page is first mapped to user space.

Fix it by decoupling __GFP_ZEROTAGS from __GFP_ZERO, passing to tag_clear_highpages() whether we want to also clear page content. Invert the meaning of the tag_clear_highpages() return value to have clearer semantics.

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 6 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 6 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 6 days ago·verify at source

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