Medium [CVE-2026-68172] Linux kernel (arm64): Denial of Service and memory access due to unaligned address handling

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: arm64: make huge_ptep_get handled unaligned addresses huge_ptep_get() can be handed a virtual address pointing to the middle of a contpmd/contpte mapped hugetlb folio (examples of callers are pagemap_hugetlb_range, page_mapped_in_vma).

The arm64 helper rewalks the pgtables in find_num_contig to answer whether the huge pte we have maps a contpmd or a contpte hugetlb folio, and returns CONT_PMDS or CONT_PTES, so that it can collect a/d bits over the contiguous ptes. We can falsely return CONT_PTES instead of CONT_PMDS if the addr is not aligned.

On systems where CONT_PTES!= CONT_PMDS (meaning page size is 16K), we could collect excess A/D bit state, meaning extra work for the kernel. Even worse, we may iterate beyond the PTE table and dereference a garbage ptep pointer to access physical memory we don't own.

Since the ptep pointer is a linear map address, we may run off the end of the linear map or into a hole, dereference a VA not mapped into the kernel pgtables and cause kernel panic.

Fix this by aligning the pmdp pointer down to a contpmd base before checking equality with the passed huge pte pointer, to correctly answer whether the huge pte is the base of a contpmd block. A flaw was found in the Linux kernel, specifically within the `huge_ptep_get()` helper function for the arm64 architecture.