CVE-2026-74481: mm/page_reporting: use system_freezable_wq to fix UAF during suspend

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

Description
===========

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

mm/page_reporting: use system_freezable_wq to fix UAF during suspend

During PM freeze (e.g.  S3 suspend or S4 hibernation), device drivers like
virtio_balloon reset their underlying virtio devices and delete their
virtqueues via vdev->config->del_vqs().

However, page reporting work (page_reporting_process) was scheduled on the
global system_wq.  Because system_wq lacks the WQ_FREEZABLE flag, the PM
freezer skips it, leaving page_reporting_process active during suspend.

If pages are freed into the buddy allocator while suspending (for example,
when core MM invokes the balloon shrinker during S4 hibernation image
saving), page reporting triggers virtballoon_free_page_report() on deleted
virtqueues, resulting in a Use-After-Free / General Protection Fault:

    [  196.795226] general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xaa1436fe70dae6df: 0000 [#1] SMP NOPTI
    [  196.825967] Workqueue: events page_reporting_process
    [  196.831038] RIP: 0010:virtqueue_add_split+0x233/0x4c0 [virtio_ring]
    [  196.927073] virtballoon_free_page_report+0x3a/0xe0 [virtio_balloon]
    [  196.946943] page_reporting_process+0x370/0x4f0

Fix this by switching page reporting work to system_freezable_wq.  This
ensures that the PM freezer pauses page_reporting_process before device
drivers destroy their reporting virtqueues.  Because the reporting worker
is frozen, memory reclamation/freeing (e.g.  via shrinker execution) can
safely return pages to MM during freeze without triggering unfrozen
reporting work on deleted virtqueues.

This aligns with the driver's existing design. The comment in
virtballoon_freeze() states:
    /*
     * The workqueue is already frozen by the PM core before this
     * function is called.
     */

Testing:
I have verified these fixes using Google’s virtualization infrastructure
by running continuous suspend/resume iterations (40+ cycles) while
churning memory using stress-ng (`stress-ng --vm 4 --vm-bytes 60%
--timeout 1`) to constantly create free pages for the buddy allocator.  We
also set the `page_reporting_order` parameter to 0 to make the page
reporting worker highly sensitive, forcing it to pick up any 4K free
pages.  This confirmed that the UAF crashes are no longer reproducible.

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2026-74481 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Issue introduced in 5.7 with commit 36e66c554b5c6a9d17a229faca7a61693527b0bd and fixed in 6.6.151 with commit f978048326570047e8216e81a67f9c71ef2bb1b1
	Issue introduced in 5.7 with commit 36e66c554b5c6a9d17a229faca7a61693527b0bd and fixed in 6.12.103 with commit 450f35f4d5a682a0796757e52295df58ddb63bc9
	Issue introduced in 5.7 with commit 36e66c554b5c6a9d17a229faca7a61693527b0bd and fixed in 6.18.44 with commit b11907c905fa08eda925395f0724b7a409870f65
	Issue introduced in 5.7 with commit 36e66c554b5c6a9d17a229faca7a61693527b0bd and fixed in 7.1.8 with commit faf439b5fa7b231120eac4f7a617e0bfd4f6f5c7
	Issue introduced in 5.7 with commit 36e66c554b5c6a9d17a229faca7a61693527b0bd and fixed in 7.2-rc6 with commit 0b45f6927a14914ff685fe0e6f9d11232a1e03df

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2026-74481
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	mm/page_reporting.c


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f978048326570047e8216e81a67f9c71ef2bb1b1
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/450f35f4d5a682a0796757e52295df58ddb63bc9
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b11907c905fa08eda925395f0724b7a409870f65
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/faf439b5fa7b231120eac4f7a617e0bfd4f6f5c7
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0b45f6927a14914ff685fe0e6f9d11232a1e03df