HIGH Introduced in 6.13
xe FlatCCS Corruption
CVE-2026-90047
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
KernelScan AI7.7HIGH
01Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM get_flat_ccs_offset() reads the base of the flat CCS storage from the hardware, scales it by the number of enabled L3 nodes, and rounds the result up to 128K. Everything below that offset is then handed to the VRAM allocator as usable memory. Rounding a limit that means "usable memory ends here" upwards publishes whatever lies between the real base and the rounded one as free memory, and that memory belongs to the compression hardware. The scaled value has no reason to be 128K aligned, and on a Battlemage G21 with 16 GiB it is not: flat CCS base: raw 0x3fafff800, rounded 0x3fb000000 so the last 2 KiB of page 0x3fafff000 is CCS storage, in the allocator's pool. Whatever is allocated there gets that tail overwritten by the compression hardware, which needs no page-table entry, no buffer object and no GPU submission to do it, and does it before userspace exists. On this machine a Mesa VM's level-3 page table landed on that page on every cold boot. It lost the entry covering the compositor's batch-buffer heap, so the compositor's first submission faulted fetching its batch and gdm restarted it forever: a black screen on an otherwise working machine. Restarting gdm cleared it because the next VM's page tables were allocated somewhere else. Round down instead, to the page size the allocator works in. On this machine that excludes exactly one page. Reading the reserved page afterwards shows what had been writing it: [369] 0xcccc000000000000 [371] 0xcc77000000000000 [373] 0xcccc000000000000 [375] 0xcc77000000000000 compression metadata, two bytes per sixteen, sitting where the driver used to hand out memory. The assertion that should have caught this compares the offset against GSMBASE - ccs_size for equality. That value is 128K aligned, so it agrees with the rounded-up offset precisely when the base is not aligned - the check cannot fail in the case it exists to catch, and is compiled out unless CONFIG_DRM_XE_DEBUG is set. Replace it with one that can fail: CCS storage must not run into GSM. [ And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it. I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am. But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above. This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]
02KernelScan AI Analysis
Risk summary
Systems with Intel Battlemage GPUs using the xe driver can have GPU memory silently corrupted by the compression hardware because the driver incorrectly publishes a small region of compression storage as free VRAM. Any local user with GPU access is affected; the corruption occurs automatically and can cause display compositor crashes or persistent black screens. The impact extends to multi-tenant or container environments where the GPU is shared.
Vulnerability analysis
The GPU driver incorrectly rounds the base address of the compression hardware's private storage upward, causing a small region of VRAM that belongs to the compression engine to be published as free memory to the allocator. When the allocator places objects in that region, the compression hardware overwrites them with metadata, corrupting whatever was allocated there — page tables, buffers, or other GPU objects — without any GPU submission or userspace action. The fix changes the rounding direction so the compression storage is excluded from the allocator's pool, and replaces a debug-only assertion that could never catch the misalignment with one that actually validates the boundary. This affects systems with Intel Battlemage GPUs using the xe driver; any local user with GPU access is affected, and the corruption occurs automatically during normal operation.
Lifecycle
03Fix Versions
| Branch | Introduced | Fixed in | Patch commit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6.18 | 6.13 | 6.18.51 | c96477e0cabf |
| 7.2 | 6.13 | 7.2.5 | 348c3db4f152 |
| mainline | 6.13 | 7.3 | 818bebeb63dd |