CVE-2026-23352

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/efi: defer freeing of boot services memory

efi_free_boot_services() frees memory occupied by EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_CODE and EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_DATA using memblock_free_late().

There are two issue with that: memblock_free_late() should be used for memory allocated with memblock_alloc() while the memory reserved with memblock_reserve() should be freed with free_reserved_area().

More acutely, with CONFIG_DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT=y efi_free_boot_services() is called before deferred initialization of the memory map is complete.

Benjamin Herrenschmidt reports that this causes a leak of ~140MB of RAM on EC2 t3a.nano instances which only have 512MB or RAM.

If the freed memory resides in the areas that memory map for them is still uninitialized, they wont be actually freed because memblock_free_late() calls memblock_free_pages() and the latter skips uninitialized pages.

Using free_reserved_area() at this point is also problematic because __free_page() accesses the buddy of the freed page and that again might end up in uninitialized part of the memory map.

Delaying the entire efi_free_boot_services() could be problematic because in addition to freeing boot services memory it updates efi.memmap without any synchronization and thats undesirable late in boot when there is concurrency.

More robust approach is to only defer freeing of the EFI boot services memory.

Split efi_free_boot_services() in two. First efi_unmap_boot_services() collects ranges that should be freed into an array then efi_free_boot_services() later frees them after deferred init is complete.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/227688312fece0026fc67a00ba9a0b3611ebe95d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/399da820ecfe6f4f10c143e5c453d3559a04db9c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4a2cb90c538f06c873a187aa743575d48685d7a6
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6a25e25279282c5c8ade554c04c6ab9dc7902c64
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6d8ba221e7aafaa2f284b7d22faee814c28e009d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7131bd1fecc749bc94fb44aae217bbd8a8a85264
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7dcf59422a3b0d20ddda844f856b4a1e0608a326
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a4b0bf6a40f3c107c67a24fbc614510ef5719980
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f9e9cc320854a76a39e7bc92d144554f3a727fad