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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38241 json

mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

published 2025-07-09 16 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-20820

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 1%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

Following softlockup can be easily reproduced on my test machine with:

echo always > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepages-64kB/enabled swapon /dev/zram0 # zram0 is a 48G swap device mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test echo 1G > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.max echo $BASHPID > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/cgroup.procs while true; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1M count=5120 cat /tmp/test.img > /dev/null rm /tmp/test.img done

Then after a while: watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 763s! [cat:5787] Modules linked in: zram virtiofs CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 5787 Comm: cat Kdump: loaded Tainted: G L 6.15.0.orig-gf3021d9246bc-dirty #118 PREEMPT(voluntary)· Tainted: [L]=SOFTLOCKUP Hardware name: Red Hat KVM/RHEL-AV, BIOS 0.0.0 02/06/2015 RIP: 0010:mpol_shared_policy_lookup+0xd/0x70 Code: e9 b8 b4 ff ff 31 c0 c3 cc cc cc cc 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 66 0f 1f 00 0f 1f 44 00 00 41 54 55 53 <48> 8b 1f 48 85 db 74 41 4c 8d 67 08 48 89 fb 48 89 f5 4c 89 e7 e8 RSP: 0018:ffffc90002b1fc28 EFLAGS: 00000202 RAX: 00000000001c20ca RBX: 0000000000724e1e RCX: 0000000000000001 RDX: ffff888118e214c8 RSI: 0000000000057d42 RDI: ffff888118e21518 RBP: 000000000002bec8 R08: 0000000000000001 R09: 0000000000000000 R10: 0000000000000bf4 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: 0000000000000001 R13: 00000000001c20ca R14: 00000000001c20ca R15: 0000000000000000 FS: 00007f03f995c740(0000) GS:ffff88a07ad9a000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033 CR2: 00007f03f98f1000 CR3: 0000000144626004 CR4: 0000000000770eb0 DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000 DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000fffe0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400 PKRU: 55555554 Call Trace: <TASK> shmem_alloc_folio+0x31/0xc0 shmem_swapin_folio+0x309/0xcf0 ? filemap_get_entry+0x117/0x1e0 ? xas_load+0xd/0xb0 ? filemap_get_entry+0x101/0x1e0 shmem_get_folio_gfp+0x2ed/0x5b0 shmem_file_read_iter+0x7f/0x2e0 vfs_read+0x252/0x330 ksys_read+0x68/0xf0 do_syscall_64+0x4c/0x1c0 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e RIP: 0033:0x7f03f9a46991 Code: 00 48 8b 15 81 14 10 00 f7 d8 64 89 02 b8 ff ff ff ff eb bd e8 20 ad 01 00 f3 0f 1e fa 80 3d 35 97 10 00 00 74 13 31 c0 0f 05 <48> 3d 00 f0 ff ff 77 4f c3 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 55 48 89 e5 48 83 ec RSP: 002b:00007fff3c52bd28 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000000 RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 0000000000040000 RCX: 00007f03f9a46991 RDX: 0000000000040000 RSI: 00007f03f98ba000 RDI: 0000000000000003 RBP: 00007fff3c52bd50 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: 00007f03f9b9a380 R10: 0000000000000022 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 0000000000040000 R13: 00007f03f98ba000 R14: 0000000000000003 R15: 0000000000000000 </TASK>

The reason is simple, readahead brought some order 0 folio in swap cache, and the swapin mTHP folio being allocated is in conflict with it, so swapcache_prepare fails and causes shmem_swap_alloc_folio to return -EEXIST, and shmem simply retries again and again causing this loop.

Fix it by applying a similar fix for anon mTHP swapin.

The performance change is very slight, time of swapin 10g zero folios with shmem (test for 12 times): Before: 2.47s After: 2.48s

[kasong@tencent.com: add comment]

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.15.5, 6.16
  • linux-aws-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1015.15~24.04.1
  • linux-gcp-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1018.19~24.04.1
  • linux-oem-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1014.14
  • linux-azure-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1014.14~24.04.1
  • linux-riscv-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-34.34.1~24.04.1
  • linux-oracle-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1015.15~24.04.1
  • linux-azure-nvidia-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1007.7
  • linux-realtime-6.14 Ubuntu Pro Realtime 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1014.14~24.04.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38241

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

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-2025-38241 updated

kernel: mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

  • 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 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

0.11% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 1% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
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

Weakness
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.