CVE-2026-98440 PUBLISHED

KVM: arm64: nv: Delay freeing of shadow S2 structures until VM destruction

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 18.10.2026 Updated: 18.10.2026

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

KVM: arm64: nv: Delay freeing of shadow S2 structures until VM destruction

We free the shadow S2 structures from kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all(), which is a Bad Idea(tm). Freeing the page tables is fair game (this is what this callback is for), but freeing the container that could still be referenced by another part of the system is not great.

Instead, grow separate destructors that gets called when we tear the VM down for good. From there, we can nuke both the individual MMUs as well as the global array that points to them, safe in the knowledge that the vcpus themselves have been destroyed already.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 4f128f8e1aaac189f83d0f828bcdb2986d8d2e51 to 876049f026b4dfaca0cc78ec81be0e639ca8525d (excl.)
  • affected from 4f128f8e1aaac189f83d0f828bcdb2986d8d2e51 to 22e82acec93a681071ed36f70eabe2d0c4e0bebd (excl.)
  • affected from 4f128f8e1aaac189f83d0f828bcdb2986d8d2e51 to 5bf1c9175e657b3c2dc1cf77403031ac7aadcf66 (excl.)
  • affected from 4f128f8e1aaac189f83d0f828bcdb2986d8d2e51 to e5843f4effaa2ffac3e789ecd4456403564961d4 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 6.11 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 6.11 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.113 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.56 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.9 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc5 to * (incl.)

References