CVE-2025-38008 Affecting kernel package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
medium

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.02% (3rd percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RHEL10-KERNEL-10492459
  • published21 Jun 2025
  • disclosed18 Jun 2025

Introduced: 18 Jun 2025

NewCVE-2025-38008  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for RHEL:10 kernel.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel package and not the kernel package as distributed by RHEL. See How to fix? for RHEL:10 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

mm/page_alloc: fix race condition in unaccepted memory handling

The page allocator tracks the number of zones that have unaccepted memory using static_branch_enc/dec() and uses that static branch in hot paths to determine if it needs to deal with unaccepted memory.

Borislav and Thomas pointed out that the tracking is racy: operations on static_branch are not serialized against adding/removing unaccepted pages to/from the zone.

Sanity checks inside static_branch machinery detects it:

WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 10 at kernel/jump_label.c:276 __static_key_slow_dec_cpuslocked+0x8e/0xa0

The comment around the WARN() explains the problem:

/*
 * Warn about the '-1' case though; since that means a
 * decrement is concurrent with a first (0->1) increment. IOW
 * people are trying to disable something that wasn't yet fully
 * enabled. This suggests an ordering problem on the user side.
 */

The effect of this static_branch optimization is only visible on microbenchmark.

Instead of adding more complexity around it, remove it altogether.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1