CVE-2026-46279

Name of the Vulnerable Software and Affected Versions Linux kernel versions prior to 7.0.12-1.1

Description An issue exists in the memory management system where page ext is initialized late during the boot process. Consequently, some pages allocated and freed before page ext becomes available have an uninitialized codetag. For instance, in init section page ext(), the alloc page ext() function calls kmemleak alloc(), which may fall back to the buddy allocator if the slab cache is empty. Because page ext is not yet fully initialized, these pages lack a codetag, leading to warnings when they are later reclaimed by KASAN (Kernel Address Sanitizer) and freed. This behavior is specifically observed when CONFIG MEM ALLOC PROFILING DEBUG=Y is enabled and mem profiling compressed is disabled. The issue involves the pgalloc tag sub() function.

Recommendations Update the Linux kernel to version 7.0.12-1.1 or later.