Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/zswap: fix inconsistency when zswap_store_page() fails

Commit b7c0ccdfbafd ("mm: zswap: support large folios in zswap_store()")
skips charging any zswap entries when it failed to zswap the entire folio.

However, when some base pages are zswapped but it failed to zswap the
entire folio, the zswap operation is rolled back. When freeing zswap
entries for those pages, zswap_entry_free() uncharges the zswap entries
that were not previously charged, causing zswap charging to become
inconsistent.

This inconsistency triggers two warnings with following steps:
# On a machine with 64GiB of RAM and 36GiB of zswap
$ stress-ng --bigheap 2 # wait until the OOM-killer kills stress-ng
$ sudo reboot

The two warnings are:
in mm/memcontrol.c:163, function obj_cgroup_release():
WARN_ON_ONCE(nr_bytes & (PAGE_SIZE - 1));

in mm/page_counter.c:60, function page_counter_cancel():
if (WARN_ONCE(new < 0, "page_counter underflow: %ld nr_pages=%lu\n",
new, nr_pages))

zswap_stored_pages also becomes inconsistent in the same way.

As suggested by Kanchana, increment zswap_stored_pages and charge zswap
entries within zswap_store_page() when it succeeds. This way,
zswap_entry_free() will decrement the counter and uncharge the entries
when it failed to zswap the entire folio.

While this could potentially be optimized by batching objcg charging and
incrementing the counter, let's focus on fixing t...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-21860

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux, Linux

Product: Linux, Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.02% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 1.56% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-04-10 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-21860
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a3652f5552b20903315612da487a7be2b95394d5
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/63895d20d63b446f5049a963983489319c2ea3e2

Timeline