Monitor vulnerabilities like this one. Sign up free to get alerted when software you use is affected.

Linux Swap Corruption: Infinite Loop on Large Swap Truncation

CVE-2026-23177
Summary

A fix has been made to prevent an infinite loop from occurring when a large swap entry is being truncated in the Linux kernel. This issue could have caused corruption or data loss. The fix is already included in the kernel, so no action is required.

Original title
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm, shmem: prevent infinite loop on truncate race When truncating a large swap entry, shmem_free_swap() returns 0 when the entr...
Original description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm, shmem: prevent infinite loop on truncate race

When truncating a large swap entry, shmem_free_swap() returns 0 when the
entry's index doesn't match the given index due to lookup alignment. The
failure fallback path checks if the entry crosses the end border and
aborts when it happens, so truncate won't erase an unexpected entry or
range. But one scenario was ignored.

When `index` points to the middle of a large swap entry, and the large
swap entry doesn't go across the end border, find_get_entries() will
return that large swap entry as the first item in the batch with
`indices[0]` equal to `index`. The entry's base index will be smaller
than `indices[0]`, so shmem_free_swap() will fail and return 0 due to the
"base < index" check. The code will then call shmem_confirm_swap(), get
the order, check if it crosses the END boundary (which it doesn't), and
retry with the same index.

The next iteration will find the same entry again at the same index with
same indices, leading to an infinite loop.

Fix this by retrying with a round-down index, and abort if the index is
smaller than the truncate range.
Published: 14 Feb 2026 · Updated: 10 Mar 2026 · First seen: 6 Mar 2026