mm/page_alloc: clear page->private in free_pages_prepare()
authorMikhail Gavrilov <mikhail.v.gavrilov@gmail.com>
Sat, 7 Feb 2026 17:36:14 +0000 (22:36 +0500)
committerAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:43:02 +0000 (15:43 -0800)
commitac1ea219590c09572ed5992dc233bbf7bb70fef9
tree87e01779db7b6fabbe576b0a890bc3b4b0fadf14
parentd51b5076c7468fad568645caf38a6979458a5de1
mm/page_alloc: clear page->private in free_pages_prepare()

Several subsystems (slub, shmem, ttm, etc.) use page->private but don't
clear it before freeing pages.  When these pages are later allocated as
high-order pages and split via split_page(), tail pages retain stale
page->private values.

This causes a use-after-free in the swap subsystem.  The swap code uses
page->private to track swap count continuations, assuming freshly
allocated pages have page->private == 0.  When stale values are present,
swap_count_continued() incorrectly assumes the continuation list is valid
and iterates over uninitialized page->lru containing LIST_POISON values,
causing a crash:

  KASAN: maybe wild-memory-access in range [0xdead000000000100-0xdead000000000107]
  RIP: 0010:__do_sys_swapoff+0x1151/0x1860

Fix this by clearing page->private in free_pages_prepare(), ensuring all
freed pages have clean state regardless of previous use.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260207173615.146159-1-mikhail.v.gavrilov@gmail.com
Fixes: 3b8000ae185c ("mm/vmalloc: huge vmalloc backing pages should be split rather than compound")
Signed-off-by: Mikhail Gavrilov <mikhail.v.gavrilov@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Acked-by: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Arm) <david@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Brendan Jackman <jackmanb@google.com>
Cc: Chris Li <chrisl@kernel.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Kairui Song <ryncsn@gmail.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
mm/page_alloc.c