Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's networking component could lead to excessive system logging during low-memory conditions. When the system is under heavy network load and runs out of memory, it may generate a flood of warning messages that can impact system performance or fill up storage. This update ensures these redundant warnings are suppressed, maintaining better system stability during resource exhaustion.
Technical details
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's page_pool allocator (net/core/page_pool.c) occurred because atomic allocations from the network datapath did not consistently include the GFP_NOWARN flag. During Out-of-Memory (OOM) conditions, network receive (Rx) operations frequently fail to allocate pages; without GFP_NOWARN, the kernel triggers verbose OOM reports for every failure. An attacker could potentially trigger these conditions via network traffic to cause a denial-of-service through log exhaustion or CPU overhead from logging. The fix ensures GFP_NOWARN is automatically added to all GFP_ATOMIC allocations within the page_pool. Patches are available in various stable kernel branches including 5.15.197, 6.1.159, 6.6.117, 6.12.58, and 6.17.8.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 4.18 to 6.17.8
Timeline
- 2025-12-16: advisory: Initial disclosure and NVD publication
- 2025-12-07: patched: Fix committed to stable kernel trees
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0ec2cd5c58793d0c622797cd5fbe26634b357210
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3671a0775952026228ae44e096eb144bca75f8dc
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7613c06ffa89c1e2266fb532e23ef7dfdf269d73
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9835a0fd59a1df5ec0740fdab6d50db68e0f10de
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ab48dc0e23eb714b3f233f8e8f6deed7df2051f5
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f3b52167a0cb23b27414452fbc1278da2ee884fc