CVE-2026-72172
Received
Received - Intake
Memory Corruption in Linux Kernel mm_init
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-72172, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-15
Last updated on: 2026-08-15
Assigner: kernel.org
Description
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/mm_init: fix uninitialized struct pages for ZONE_DEVICE
If DAX memory is hotplugged into an unoccupied subsection of an early
section, section_activate() reuses the unoptimized boot memmap. However,
compound_nr_pages() still assumes that vmemmap optimization is in effect
and initializes only the reduced number of struct pages. As a result, the
remaining tail struct pages are left uninitialized, which can later lead
to unexpected behavior or crashes.
Fix this by treating early sections as unoptimized when calculating how
many struct pages to initialize.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| linux | linux_kernel | * |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-UNKNOWN |
