CVE-2025-68248

Linux Kernel 6.17-6.17.5 - Denial of Service via Balloon Page Migration

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: vmw_balloon: indicate success when effectively deflating during migration When migrating a balloon page, we first deflate the old page to then inflate the new page. However, if inflating the new page succeeded, we effectively deflated the old page, reducing the balloon size. In that case, the migration actually worked: similar to migrating+ immediately deflating the new page. The old page will be freed back to the buddy. Right now, the core will leave the page be marked as isolated (as we returned an error). When later trying to putback that page, we will run into the WARN_ON_ONCE() in balloon_page_putback(). That handling was changed in commit 3544c4faccb8 ("mm/balloon_compaction: stop using __ClearPageMovable()"); before that change, we would have tolerated that way of handling it. To fix it, let's just return 0 in that case, making the core effectively just clear the "isolated" flag + freeing it back to the buddy as if the migration succeeded. Note that the new page will also get freed when the core puts the last reference. Note that this also makes it all be more consistent: we will no longer unisolate the page in the balloon driver while keeping it marked as being isolated in migration core. This was found by code inspection.

Scores

EPSS 0.0003
EPSS Percentile 7.8%

Details

Status published
Products (7)
linux/Kernel 6.17.0 - 6.17.6linux
Linux/Linux < 6.17
Linux/Linux 3544c4faccb8f0867bc65f8007ee70bfb5054305 - 4ba5a8a7faa647ada8eae61a36517cf369f5bbe4
Linux/Linux 3544c4faccb8f0867bc65f8007ee70bfb5054305 - aa05a044c5c2e147d726ac2fae1a97e0775eac11
Linux/Linux 6.17
Linux/Linux 6.17.6 - 6.17.*
Linux/Linux 6.18
Published Dec 16, 2025
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026