Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2024-50263 json

fork: only invoke khugepaged, ksm hooks if no error

published 2024-11-11 23 mo ago modified 2026-08-05 3 mo ago also EUVD-2024-45170

cvss
7.8
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 11%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

fork: only invoke khugepaged, ksm hooks if no error

There is no reason to invoke these hooks early against an mm that is in an incomplete state.

The change in commit d24062914837 ("fork: use __mt_dup() to duplicate maple tree in dup_mmap()") makes this more pertinent as we may be in a state where entries in the maple tree are not yet consistent.

Their placement early in dup_mmap() only appears to have been meaningful for early error checking, and since functionally it'd require a very small allocation to fail (in practice 'too small to fail') that'd only occur in the most dire circumstances, meaning the fork would fail or be OOM'd in any case.

Since both khugepaged and KSM tracking are there to provide optimisations to memory performance rather than critical functionality, it doesn't really matter all that much if, under such dire memory pressure, we fail to register an mm with these.

As a result, we follow the example of commit d2081b2bf819 ("mm: khugepaged: make khugepaged_enter() void function") and make ksm_fork() a void function also.

We only expose the mm to these functions once we are done with them and only if no error occurred in the fork operation.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.11.7, 6.12
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.11.7-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2024-50263

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-58.60
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1027.29
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1028.30
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1023.27
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1024.24
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1027.32
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1010.12
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1028.32

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2024-50263

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-source-longterm openSUSE Tumbleweed 6.12.11-1.1
  • kernel-source openSUSE Tumbleweed 6.11.8-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2025:14705-1openSUSE-SU-2024:14500-1

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-2024-50263 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: fork: only invoke khugepaged, ksm hooks if no error

  • 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 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 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

Exploit prediction

0.21% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 11% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/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.