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Advisory severityMedium5.5Red 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.

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CVE-2026-64130 Source published Source updated

VulniPulse record published Record updated

CVE-2026-64130
Affected products & platforms
Red Hat LinuxLinux Kernel
Open source advisory

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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 does not mean 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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