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

x86/mm/pat: fix VM_PAT handling in COW mappings

PAT handling won’t do the right thing in COW mappings: the first PTE (or,
in fact, all PTEs) can be replaced during write faults to point at anon
folios. Reliably recovering the correct PFN and cachemode using
follow_phys() from PTEs will not work in COW mappings.

Using follow_phys(), we might just get the address+protection of the anon
folio (which is very wrong), or fail on swap/nonswap entries, failing
follow_phys() and triggering a WARN_ON_ONCE() in untrack_pfn() and
track_pfn_copy(), not properly calling free_pfn_range().

In free_pfn_range(), we either wouldn’t call memtype_free() or would call
it with the wrong range, possibly leaking memory.

To fix that, let’s update follow_phys() to refuse returning anon folios,
and fallback to using the stored PFN inside vma->vm_pgoff for COW mappings
if we run into that.

We will now properly handle untrack_pfn() with COW mappings, where we
don’t need the cachemode. We’ll have to fail fork()->track_pfn_copy() if
the first page was replaced by an anon folio, though: we’d have to store
the cachemode in the VMA to make this work, likely growing the VMA size.

For now, lets keep it simple and let track_pfn_copy() just fail in that
case: it would have failed in the past with swap/nonswap entries already,
and it would have done the wrong thing with anon folios.

Simple reproducer to trigger the WARN_ON_ONCE() in untrack_pfn():

<— C reproducer —>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <liburing.h>

int main(void)
{
struct io_uring_params p = {};
int ring_fd;
size_t size;
char *map;

     ring_fd = io_uring_setup(1, &p);
     if (ring_fd < 0) {
             perror("io_uring_setup");
             return 1;
     }
     size = p.sq_off.array + p.sq_entries * sizeof(unsigned);

     /* Map the submission queue ring MAP_PRIVATE */
     map = mmap(0, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE,
                ring_fd, IORING_OFF_SQ_RING);
     if (map == MAP_FAILED) {
             perror("mmap");
             return 1;
     }

     /* We have at least one page. Let's COW it. */
     *map = 0;
     pause();
     return 0;

}
<— C reproducer —>

On a system with 16 GiB RAM and swap configured:

./iouring &

memhog 16G

killall iouring

[ 301.552930] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[ 301.553285] WARNING: CPU: 7 PID: 1402 at arch/x86/mm/pat/memtype.c:1060 untrack_pfn+0xf4/0x100
[ 301.553989] Modules linked in: binfmt_misc nft_fib_inet nft_fib_ipv4 nft_fib_ipv6 nft_fib nft_reject_g
[ 301.558232] CPU: 7 PID: 1402 Comm: iouring Not tainted 6.7.5-100.fc38.x86_64 #1
[ 301.558772] Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009), BIOS rel-1.16.3-0-ga6ed6b701f0a-prebu4
[ 301.559569] RIP: 0010:untrack_pfn+0xf4/0x100
[ 301.559893] Code: 75 c4 eb cf 48 8b 43 10 8b a8 e8 00 00 00 3b 6b 28 74 b8 48 8b 7b 30 e8 ea 1a f7 000
[ 301.561189] RSP: 0018:ffffba2c0377fab8 EFLAGS: 00010282
[ 301.561590] RAX: 00000000ffffffea RBX: ffff9208c8ce9cc0 RCX: 000000010455e047
[ 301.562105] RDX: 07fffffff0eb1e0a RSI: 0000000000000000 RDI: ffff9208c391d200
[ 301.562628] RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: ffffba2c0377fab8 R09: 0000000000000000
[ 301.563145] R10: ffff9208d2292d50 R11: 0000000000000002 R12: 00007fea890e0000
[ 301.563669] R13: 0000000000000000 R14: ffffba2c0377fc08 R15: 0000000000000000
[ 301.564186] FS: 0000000000000000(0000) GS:ffff920c2fbc0000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
[ 301.564773] CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
[ 301.565197] CR2: 00007fea88ee8a20 CR3: 00000001033a8000 CR4: 0000000000750ef0
[ 301.565725] PKRU: 55555554
[ 301.565944] Call Trace:
[ 301.566148] <TASK>
[ 301.566325] ? untrack_pfn+0xf4/0x100
[ 301.566618] ? __warn+0x81/0x130
[ 301.566876] ? untrack_pfn+0xf4/0x100
[ 3
—truncated—