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HIGH

KVM: x86: Mark target gfn of emulated atomic instruction as dirty

Published May 17, 2024

Description

When emulating an atomic access on behalf of the guest, mark the target gfn dirty if the CMPXCHG by KVM is attempted and doesn't fault. This fixes a bug where KVM effectively corrupts guest memory during live migration by writing to guest memory without informing userspace that the page is dirty.

Marking the page dirty got unintentionally dropped when KVM's emulated CMPXCHG was converted to do a user access. Before that, KVM explicitly mapped the guest page into kernel memory, and marked the page dirty during the unmap phase.

Mark the page dirty even if the CMPXCHG fails, as the old data is written back on failure, i.e. the page is still written. The value written is guaranteed to be the same because the operation is atomic, but KVM's ABI is that all writes are dirty logged regardless of the value written. And more importantly, that's what KVM did before the buggy commit.

Huge kudos to the folks on the Cc list (and many others), who did all the actual work of triaging and debugging.

base-commit: 6769ea8da8a93ed4630f1ce64df6aafcaabfce64

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Weaknesses (1)

References (11)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources

CVE.org / MITRE

Status PUBLISHED
Assigner Linux
Published May 17, 2024
Updated Aug 5, 2026
Reserved May 17, 2024

CISA Vulnrichment

Updated May 17, 2024

NVD

Status Modified
Modified Aug 4, 2026

Red Hat

Severity Low
Public date May 17, 2024
Bugzilla 2281227

ENISA EUVD

Assigner Linux
Published May 17, 2024
Updated Aug 5, 2026

GitHub

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