vmw_balloon: indicate success when effectively deflating during migration
Key facts
- Attack vector
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- Privileges required
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- User interaction
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- Attack complexity
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- Impact type
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- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
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- Fix status
- Fixed
No CVSS vector from any source. Fix status from CNA.
Summary
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.
Why it matters now
SSVC decision points
Not available: CISA has not published SSVC decision points for this record.
Affected products
Remediation
- Fix · CNA Linux (Linux) Fixed in 6.17.6, 6.18
Vendor assessments
Red Hat
Not affected: 5 products
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
Timeline
- 2026-10-02 Threatist record created from CVE-2025-68248
- 2026-10-03 Alias added: GHSA-98x7-gjfm-r896
References
More Linux vulnerabilities
- TI-2025-26358 tls: fix handling of zero-length records on the rx_list KEVCVSS 3.1CRITICAL 9.8
- TI-2026-38352 netfilter: bridge: make ebt_snat ARP rewrite writable KEVCVSS 3.1HIGH 8.8
- TI-2021-02452 Incorrect authorization in Ubuntu linux kernel KEVCVSS 3.1HIGH 8.8
- TI-2013-05264 The (1) get_user and (2) put_user API functions in the Linux kernel before 3.5.5 on the… KEVCVSS 3.1HIGH 8.8
- TI-2022-00125 Integer overflow in kernel KEVCVSS 3.1HIGH 8.4
- TI-2013-01864 The perf_swevent_init function in kernel/events/core.c in the Linux kernel before 3.8.9… KEVCVSS 3.1HIGH 8.4
Sources
- CVE-2025-68248 · CVE Program
- CVE-2025-68248 · NVD
- FIRST EPSS
- GHSA-98x7-gjfm-r896 · GitHub Advisory Database · CC BY 4.0
- CVE-2025-68248 · Red Hat security data · CC BY 4.0
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