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Fencer Vulns
low 3.3

CVE-2025-21860 json

mm/zswap: fix inconsistency when zswap_store_page() fails

published 2025-03-12 19 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-7598

cvss
3.3
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 13%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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 the bug this time and leave the optimization for later after some evaluation.

After resolving the inconsistency, the warnings disappear.

[42.hyeyoo@gmail.com: refactor zswap_store_page()]

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.13.5, 6.14

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-2025-21860 updated cvss 3.3

kernel: mm/zswap: fix inconsistency when zswap_store_page() fails

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more 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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    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

0.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 13% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 3.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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