CVE-2026-53162 PUBLISHED

memcg: use round-robin victim selection in refill_stock

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 09.06.2026 Published: 25.06.2026 Updated: 25.06.2026

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

memcg: use round-robin victim selection in refill_stock

Harry Yoo reported that get_random_u32_below() is not safe to call in the nmi context and memcg charge draining can happen in nmi context.

More specifically get_random_u32_below() is neither reentrant- nor NMI-safe: it acquires a per-cpu local_lock via local_lock_irqsave() on the batched_entropy_u32 state. An NMI that lands on a CPU mid-update of the ChaCha batch state and recurses into the random subsystem would corrupt that state. The memcg_stock local_trylock prevents re-entry on the percpu stock itself, but cannot protect an unrelated subsystem's per-cpu lock.

Replace the random pick with a per-cpu round-robin counter stored in memcg_stock_pcp and serialized by the same local_trylock that already guards cached[] and nr_pages[]. No atomics, no random calls, no extra locks needed.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from f735eebe55f8f61758fe014bd0b02ab50b059e4d to 89bd8215e25aa6999cc51696da418e0d422bc5e0 (excl.)
  • affected from f735eebe55f8f61758fe014bd0b02ab50b059e4d to 00731bd7e18f182a32ca54d6b176eaa470b51ed7 (excl.)
  • affected from f735eebe55f8f61758fe014bd0b02ab50b059e4d to c0cafe24d3f6534294c4b2bc2d47734ff7cbd313 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 6.16 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 6.16 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.36 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.0.13 to 7.0.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.1 to * (incl.)

References