CVE-2026-89915

Summary

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

KVM: arm64: Remove VM-wide VNCR mapping counter

The global VNCR mapping counter is used to decide whether an L1 provided VNCR page is mapped in L0 on any CPU at the point of dealing with a TLB invalidation. It is incremented when a mapping is made in the fixmap, and decremented when unmapped.

As it turns out, this tracking has several flaws:

  • we are trying to invalidate TLBs, and the mapping is only an opportunistic consequence of the TLB. Checking this counter to decide whether a TLB needs to be invalidated may result in missed invalidations.

  • an L1 vcpu invalidating its own TLB (a very likely case) will not succeed in invalidating the VNCR pseudo TLB because that page is not mapped in L0 at this stage.

Given that this tracking fails at delivering the minimum guarantees that are required and is only a performance optimisation, remove it completely.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
LinuxLinux4ffa72ad8f37e73bbb6c0baa88557bcb4fd39929 < 5453b85c7ebb605febac3df42021f9471663f051affected
LinuxLinux4ffa72ad8f37e73bbb6c0baa88557bcb4fd39929 < 87c2bbf189829dce4aaada8f82e3d54ccc037976affected
LinuxLinux4ffa72ad8f37e73bbb6c0baa88557bcb4fd39929 < c55bc773b6e814406658fae7dc5c15f639ed816eaffected
LinuxLinux6.16affected
LinuxLinux0 < 6.16unaffected
LinuxLinux6.18.52 <= 6.18.*unaffected
LinuxLinux7.2.5 <= 7.2.*unaffected
LinuxLinux7.3-rc1 <= *unaffected

Weaknesses

References