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Fencer Vulns
high 7.1

CVE-2022-48797 json

mm: don't try to NUMA-migrate COW pages that have other uses

published 2024-07-16 2 y ago modified 2026-08-05 3 mo ago also EUVD-2022-53676

cvss
7.1
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 15%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mm: don't try to NUMA-migrate COW pages that have other uses

Oded Gabbay reports that enabling NUMA balancing causes corruption with his Gaudi accelerator test load:

"All the details are in the bug, but the bottom line is that somehow, this patch causes corruption when the numa balancing feature is enabled AND we don't use process affinity AND we use GUP to pin pages so our accelerator can DMA to/from system memory.

Either disabling numa balancing, using process affinity to bind to specific numa-node or reverting this patch causes the bug to disappear"

and Oded bisected the issue to commit 09854ba94c6a ("mm: do_wp_page() simplification").

Now, the NUMA balancing shouldn't actually be changing the writability of a page, and as such shouldn't matter for COW. But it appears it does. Suspicious.

However, regardless of that, the condition for enabling NUMA faults in change_pte_range() is nonsensical. It uses "page_mapcount(page)" to decide if a COW page should be NUMA-protected or not, and that makes absolutely no sense.

The number of mappings a page has is irrelevant: not only does GUP get a reference to a page as in Oded's case, but the other mappings migth be paged out and the only reference to them would be in the page count.

Since we should never try to NUMA-balance a page that we can't move anyway due to other references, just fix the code to use 'page_count()'. Oded confirms that that fixes his issue.

Now, this does imply that something in NUMA balancing ends up changing page protections (other than the obvious one of making the page inaccessible to get the NUMA faulting information). Otherwise the COW simplification wouldn't matter - since doing the GUP on the page would make sure it's writable.

The cause of that permission change would be good to figure out too, since it clearly results in spurious COW events - but fixing the nonsensical test that just happened to work before is obviously the CorrectThing(tm) to do regardless.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.10.102, 5.15.25, 5.16.11, 5.17
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.16.11-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-48797

  • linux-intel-iotg-5.15 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.15.0-1008.11~20.04.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2022-48797

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-azure SLE Module for Public Cloud 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.33.63.1
  • kernel-syms-azure SLE Module for Public Cloud 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.33.63.1
  • kernel-source-azure SLE Module for Public Cloud 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.33.63.1
  • dtb-aarch64 openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.55.73.1
  • kernel-64kb SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.55.73.1
  • kernel-syms SLE Module for Development Tools 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.55.73.1
  • kernel-obs-qa openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.55.73.1
  • kernel-source SLE Module for Development Tools 15 SP5, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 5.14.21-150500.55.73.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2024:2947-1SUSE-SU-2024:2939-1SUSE-SU-2024:2929-1SUSE-SU-2024:2902-1SUSE-SU-2024:2894-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2022-48797 updated cvss 5.1

kernel: mm: don't try to NUMA-migrate COW pages that have other uses

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.24% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 15% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.