5.5

CVE-2026-23352

x86/efi: defer freeing of boot services memory

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.
Daten sind bereitgestellt durch National Vulnerability Database (NVD)
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 3.0.1 < 5.10.253
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 5.11 < 5.15.203
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 5.16 < 6.1.167
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 6.2 < 6.6.130
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 6.7 < 6.12.77
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 6.13 < 6.18.17
LinuxLinux Kernel Version >= 6.19 < 6.19.7
LinuxLinux Kernel Version2.6.39.1
LinuxLinux Kernel Version3.0 Update-
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc1
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc2
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc3
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc4
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc5
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc6
LinuxLinux Kernel Version7.0 Updaterc7
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EPSS Metriken
Typ Quelle Score Percentile
EPSS FIRST.org 0.01% 0.029
CVSS Metriken
Quelle Base Score Exploit Score Impact Score Vector String
nvd@nist.gov 5.5 1.8 3.6
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CWE-401 Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.