In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
alpha: fix user-space corruption during memory compaction
Alpha systems can suffer sporadic user-space crashes and heap corruption when memory compaction is enabled.
Symptoms include SIGSEGV, glibc allocator failures (e.g. "unaligned tcache chunk"), and compiler internal errors. The failures disappear when compaction is disabled or when using global TLB invalidation.
The root cause is insufficient TLB shootdown during page migration. Alpha relies on ASN-based MM context rollover for instruction cache coherency, but this alone is not sufficient to prevent stale data or instruction translations from surviving migration.
Fix this by introducing a migration-specific helper that combines:
The helper is used only by migration/compaction paths to avoid changing global TLB semantics.
Additionally, update flush_tlb_other(), pte_clear(), to use READ_ONCE()/WRITE_ONCE() for correct SMP memory ordering.
This fixes observed crashes on both UP and SMP Alpha systems.
Exploitability
AV:LAC:LPR:LUI:NScope
S:UImpact
C:HI:HA:H7.8/CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H