Memory Leak Affecting kernel-default-devel package, versions <5.14.21-150400.24.158.1
Threat Intelligence
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Test your applications- Snyk IDSNYK-SLES154-KERNELDEFAULTDEVEL-9534306
- published27 Mar 2025
- disclosed26 Mar 2025
Introduced: 26 Mar 2025
NewCVE-2022-49546 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade SLES:15.4 kernel-default-devel to version 5.14.21-150400.24.158.1 or higher.
NVD Description
Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-default-devel package and not the kernel-default-devel package as distributed by SLES.
See How to fix? for SLES:15.4 relevant fixed versions and status.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer
This is reported by kmemleak detector:
unreferenced object 0xffffc900002a9000 (size 4096): comm "kexec", pid 14950, jiffies 4295110793 (age 373.951s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .ELF............ 04 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..>............. backtrace: [<0000000016a8ef9f>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x101/0x170 [<000000002b66b6c0>] __vmalloc_node+0xb4/0x160 [<00000000ad40107d>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x8e/0xcd0 [<0000000019afff23>] crash_load_segments+0x260/0x470 [<0000000019ebe95c>] bzImage64_load+0x814/0xad0 [<0000000093e16b05>] arch_kexec_kernel_image_load+0x1be/0x2a0 [<000000009ef2fc88>] kimage_file_alloc_init+0x2ec/0x5a0 [<0000000038f5a97a>] __do_sys_kexec_file_load+0x28d/0x530 [<0000000087c19992>] do_syscall_64+0x3b/0x90 [<0000000066e063a4>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae
In crash_prepare_elf64_headers(), a buffer is allocated via vmalloc() to store elf headers. While it's not freed back to system correctly when kdump kernel is reloaded or unloaded. Then memory leak is caused. Fix it by introducing x86 specific function arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup(), and freeing the buffer there.
And also remove the incorrect elf header buffer freeing code. Before calling arch specific kexec_file loading function, the image instance has been initialized. So 'image->elf_headers' must be NULL. It doesn't make sense to free the elf header buffer in the place.
Three different people have reported three bugs about the memory leak on x86_64 inside Redhat.
References
- https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-49546.html
- https://bugzilla.suse.com/1238750
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/115ee42a4c2f26ba2b4ace2668a3f004621f6833
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8765a423a87d74ef24ea02b43b2728fe4039f248
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b3e34a47f98974d0844444c5121aaff123004e57
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f675e3a9189d84a9324ab45b0cb19906c2bc8fcb