CVE-2026-23352
Published: Mar 25, 2026
Modified: May 23, 2026
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/efi: defer freeing of boot services memory efi_free_boot_services() frees memory occupied by EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_CODE and EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_DATA using memblock_free_late(). There are two issue with that: memblock_free_late() should be used for memory allocated with memblock_alloc() while the memory reserved with memblock_reserve() should be freed with free_reserved_area(). More acutely, with CONFIG_DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT=y efi_free_boot_services() is called before deferred initialization of the memory map is complete. Benjamin Herrenschmidt reports that this causes a leak of ~140MB of RAM on EC2 t3a.nano instances which only have 512MB or RAM. If the freed memory resides in the areas that memory map for them is still uninitialized, they won't be actually freed because memblock_free_late() calls memblock_free_pages() and the latter skips uninitialized pages. Using free_reserved_area() at this point is also problematic because __free_page() accesses the buddy of the freed page and that again might end up in uninitialized part of the memory map. Delaying the entire efi_free_boot_services() could be problematic because in addition to freeing boot services memory it updates efi.memmap without any synchronization and that's undesirable late in boot when there is concurrency. More robust approach is to only defer freeing of the EFI boot services memory. Split efi_free_boot_services() in two. First efi_unmap_boot_services() collects ranges that should be freed into an array then efi_free_boot_services() later frees them after deferred init is complete.
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
Linux | Linux | affected 0aed459e8487eb6ebdb4efe8cefe1eafbc704b30 - < 4a2cb90c538f06c873a187aa743575d48685d7a6affected 916f676f8dc016103f983c7ec54c18ecdbb6e349 - < 7131bd1fecc749bc94fb44aae217bbd8a8a85264affected 916f676f8dc016103f983c7ec54c18ecdbb6e349 - < 6d8ba221e7aafaa2f284b7d22faee814c28e009daffected 916f676f8dc016103f983c7ec54c18ecdbb6e349 - < 227688312fece0026fc67a00ba9a0b3611ebe95daffected 916f676f8dc016103f983c7ec54c18ecdbb6e349 - < 6a25e25279282c5c8ade554c04c6ab9dc7902c64+5 more versions |
Linux | Linux | affected 3.0unaffected 0 - < 3.0unaffected 2.6.39.2 - <= 2.6.*unaffected 5.10.253 - <= 5.10.*unaffected 5.15.203 - <= 5.15.*+6 more versions |
References
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