High [CVE-2026-68086] write all dirty file folios when collapsing
This high-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-68086 affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
Aggregated and source-linked by VulniPulse. Data sources, validation and limitations.
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Summary
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/khugepaged: write all dirty file folios when collapsing [There is no upstream commit, as this code was removed by upstream commit 044925f9b565 ("mm: fs: remove filemap_nr_thps*() functions and their users")] As-is, khugepaged and writable-file opening exclude each other.
A file cannot be open writeable and have THPs (because the filesystem is not aware of them). khugepaged will never collapse file pages for files that are opened writeable. On an open(O_RDWR/O_WRONLY), the page cache for that particular file is dropped.
This is fine because nothing could've been dirtied. However, there is an edge-case: collapse_file() might not be able to coexist with concurrent writers, but it can coexist with dirty folios (from previous writers).
Therefore, the following can happen: open(file, O_RDWR) write(file) close(file) madvise(file_mapping, MADV_COLLAPSE, some non-dirty range) open(file, O_RDWR) nr_thps > 0 truncate_inode_pages() /* THPs are cleared out, but so are the dirty folios */ When this edge-case happens, there is data loss, as the dirty folios are fully discarded.
Fix it by fully writing back the page cache (and waiting) when collapsing file THPs. Doing so provides the guarantee that no dirty folio will be observed while there are active THPs.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 30 days ago·verify at source
- kernel-0:6.12.0-211.50.1.el10_2
- RHSA-2026:61887
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 30 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation
Upgrade to a fixed release: kernel-0:6.12.0-211.50.1.el10_2, RHSA-2026:61887. That is the remediation for this advisory.
The vendor advisory may list additional interim mitigations or workarounds not captured here — review it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 30 days ago·verify at source
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