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Fencer Vulns
no cvss —

CVE-2026-90040 json

KVM: SEV: Forcefully invalidate SNP VMSA if its backing gmem page is zapped

published 2026-09-16 54 d ago modified 2026-10-19 21 d ago also EUVD-2026-80648

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 10%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

KVM: SEV: Forcefully invalidate SNP VMSA if its backing gmem page is zapped

Wire up a gmem_invalidate_range() call for SNP VMs, and use it to force vCPUs to reload/recheck their guest-provided VMSA if the backing gmem page is being invalidated, e.g. is being PUNCH_HOLE'd. Use the same core logic to handle invalidations as VMX does for the APIC-access page, as the two concepts are nearly identical: shove the physical address of a page into the vCPU's control structure:

1. Snapshot the invalidation sequence counter 2. Grab the pfn (from guest_memfd in this case) 3. Acquire mmu_lock for read 4. Re-request reload if retry is needed, otherwise commit the change.

Note, the re-request action in #4 is necessary as KVM's retry logic is fuzzy, i.e. can get false positives. If the guest_memfd page has been dropped, at some point a subsequent reload will fail to get a PFN from guest_memfd, and KVM will fail KVM_RUN. If the retry was due to a false positive, KVM will retry until there are no relevant MMU notifier events (and will retry in the "outer" loop, i.e. will drop locks and resched as needed).

Note #2! Take care to invalidate the VMSA when a relevant memslot is DELETED or MOVED, as invalidations in response to PUNCH_HOLE are predicated on memslot bindings (KVM doesn't know what GFN range(s) to invalidate without a binding). And more importantly, the VMSA mapping requires a memslot, i.e. must be invalidated if its memslots disappears, regardless of the state of the underlying guest_memfd inode.

Failure to invalidate the vCPU's control.vmsa_pa (which is checked by pre_sev_run()) can prevent KVM from properly freeing the page as firmware will reject the RMPUPDATE to reclaim the page with FAIL_INUSE if the vCPU is actively running, i.e. if VMSA page is in-use. That in turn leads to an RMP #PF on the next use, as the page will still be assigned to the SNP VM.

SEV-SNP: RMPUPDATE failed for PFN 78d198, pg_level: 1, ret: 3 SEV-SNP: PFN 0x78d198, RMP entry: [0xfff0000000144001 - 0x000000000000000f] CPU: 3 UID: 0 PID: 31345 Comm: sev_snp_vmsa_pu Tainted: G U O Tainted: [U]=USER, [O]=OOT_MODULE Hardware name: Google, Inc. Arcadia_IT_80/Arcadia_IT_80, BIOS 34.86.0-102 01/25/2026 Call Trace: <TASK> dump_stack_lvl+0x54/0x70 rmpupdate+0x12c/0x140 rmp_make_shared+0x3b/0x60 sev_gmem_invalidate+0xe0/0x170 [kvm_amd] delete_from_page_cache_batch+0x1d8/0x220 truncate_inode_pages_range+0x120/0x3d0 kvm_gmem_fallocate+0x19a/0x270 [kvm] vfs_fallocate+0x1bc/0x1f0 __x64_sys_fallocate+0x48/0x70 do_syscall_64+0x10a/0x480 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53 RIP: 0033:0x496c7e </TASK> ------------[ cut here ]------------ SEV: Failed to update RMP entry for PFN 0x78d198 error -14 WARNING: arch/x86/kvm/svm/sev.c:5160 at sev_gmem_invalidate+0x126/0x170 [kvm_amd], CPU#3: sev_snp_vmsa_pu/31345 CPU: 3 UID: 0 PID: 31345 Comm: sev_snp_vmsa_pu Tainted: G U O Tainted: [U]=USER, [O]=OOT_MODULE Hardware name: Google, Inc. Arcadia_IT_80/Arcadia_IT_80, BIOS 34.86.0-102 01/25/2026 RIP: 0010:sev_gmem_invalidate+0x12b/0x170 [kvm_amd] Call Trace: <TASK> delete_from_page_cache_batch+0x1d8/0x220 truncate_inode_pages_range+0x120/0x3d0 kvm_gmem_fallocate+0x19a/0x270 [kvm] vfs_fallocate+0x1bc/0x1f0 __x64_sys_fallocate+0x48/0x70 do_syscall_64+0x10a/0x480 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53 RIP: 0033:0x496c7e </TASK> irq event stamp: 20689 hardirqs last enabled at (20699): [<ffffffff8e76092c>] __console_unlock+0x5c/0x60 hardirqs last disabled at (20708): [<ffffffff8e760911>] __console_unlock+0x41/0x60 softirqs last enabled at (20722): [<ffffffff8e6cd74e>] __irq_exit_rcu+0x7e/0x140 softirqs last disabled at (20717): [<ffffffff8e6cd74e>] __irq_exit_rcu+0x7e/0x140 ---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]--- BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: ffff99 ---truncated---

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.18.57, 7.2.5, 7.3
  • linux Debian 14 7.2.6-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-90040

  • linux Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.17
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.18
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.17
  • linux-riscv Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42.1
  • linux-oracle Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1015.16
  • linux-hwe-7.0 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42~24.04.1
  • linux-oem-7.0 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.17

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-90040

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 openSUSE Tumbleweed 7.2.7-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:11880-1

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-2026-90040 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: KVM: SEV: Forcefully invalidate SNP VMSA if its backing gmem page is zapped

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +82 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • 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 kernel-rt, kernel-rt-selftests-internal Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-8
    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 10% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

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.