KernelScan.io

HIGH Introduced in 2.6.38

kvm TLBFlush Omission

CVE-2026-98715

CVSS 8.7 / 10.0 KernelScan AI

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

01

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: SVM: Preserve TLB control (i.e. pending TLB flush) on failed VMRUN Don't reset the VMCB's TLB control back to "do nothing" on a failed VMRUN, as empirical testing shows that the CPU performs the requested TLB flush if and only if VMRUN is successful, i.e. clearing TLB control on a failed VMRUN effectively drops a TLB flush. Explicitly track the need to flush all ASIDs on a per-CPU basis, as the ASID reuse condition is tied to the pCPU, not to the vCPU. As a bonus, this also obviates the need to avoid clobbering FLUSH_ALL_ASID with TLB_CONTROL_FLUSH_ASID, e.g. in svm_flush_tlb_asid(). Deliberately don't bother saving/restoring the "old" tlb_ctl on failure, in quotes because it's not exactly the old tlb_ctl, it's the tlb_ctl from after pre_svm_run(), but before updating tlb_ctl for flush_all_asids. If VMRUN fails and TLB_CONTROL_FLUSH_ALL_ASID is forced, then the next successful run of the VMCB *may* unnecessarily flush all ASIDs, which strictly speaking could result in noisy neighbor issues. However, the fact that new_asid() is already guest-triggerable, because of KVM's flawed behavior of clearing the ASID on emulated INIT, means that a guest can already trigger a flush of all ASIDs at roughly the same rate. And once KVM stops clobbering the ASID on emulated INIT, *or* assigns a static ASID to each vCPU, this flaw goes away.

02

Engine v0.9.0

Risk summary

A guest VM running on AMD processors with SVM can cause the host kernel to drop required TLB flushes by triggering failed VMRUN executions. This leaves stale TLB entries that may allow the guest to access host memory or other guests' memory, resulting in a virtual machine escape with full confidentiality, integrity, and availability impact on the host.

Affectedarch/x86/kvm/svm/svm.c (kvm/svm)

Vulnerability analysis

The AMD virtualization code in KVM tracks pending TLB flushes in a per-vCPU control field. When the address space identifier (ASID) wraps around, a 'flush all ASIDs' request is set. However, the processor only carries out the requested flush if the VMRUN instruction succeeds. The original code cleared the flush request after every VMRUN attempt, even failed ones, which silently discarded pending flushes. A guest can deliberately trigger VMRUN failures to prevent required TLB flushes, leaving stale address translations that may map guest addresses to wrong host physical pages. The fix moves the flush-all-ASIDs tracking to a per-CPU flag that survives failed VMRUNs and is only cleared after a successful run, guaranteeing the flush eventually happens.

03

BranchIntroducedFixed inPatch commit
7.22.6.387.2.10fd873c3d1b52
mainline2.6.387.360d93c27859f

04

State of the newest release of each Civil Infrastructure Platform SLTS tree, from CIP's own fix records.

CIP treeState
cip/6.12Affected — no CIP fix yet (latest 6.12.112-cip33)
cip/6.1Affected — no CIP fix yet (latest 6.1.189-cip61)
cip/6.1-rtAffected — no CIP fix yet (latest 6.1.189-cip61-rt32)
cip/5.10Affected — no CIP fix yet (latest 5.10.271-cip78)
cip/5.10-rtAffected — no CIP fix yet (latest 5.10.268-cip77-rt34)
cip/4.19Affected — no CIP fix yet (latest 4.19.325-cip136)
cip/4.19-rtAffected — no CIP fix yet (latest 4.19.325-cip136-rt50)
cip/4.4Affected — no CIP fix yet (latest 4.4.302-cip115)
cip/4.4-rtAffected — no CIP fix yet (latest 4.4.302-cip115-rt63)