# CVE-2025-38241: mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

> A local attacker can cause a CPU soft lockup and system hang by triggering a specific memory swap-in condition with transparent huge pages enabled.

- **Severity:** Medium 5.5 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Any signed-in user
- **Attackable:** Local or same network only
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** Yes
- **Published:** 9 Jul 2025
- **Updated:** 11 May 2026
- **Also known as:** BELL-CVE-2025-38241, GHSA-j5v8-prgm-3f4c, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38241

## What is CVE-2025-38241?

CVE-2025-38241 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 9 Jul 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

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

mm/shmem, swap: fix softlockup with mTHP swapin

Following softlockup can be easily reproduced on my test machine with:

echo always > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepages-64kB/enabled
swapon /dev/zram0 # zram0 is a 48G swap device
mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test
echo 1G > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.max
echo $BASHPID > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/cgroup.procs
while true; do
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1M count=5120
    cat /tmp/test.img > /dev/null
    rm /tmp/test.img
done

Then after a while:
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 763s! [cat:5787]
Modules linked in: zram virtiofs
CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 5787 Comm: cat Kdump: loaded Tainted: G             L      6.15.0.orig-gf3021d9246bc-dirty #118 PREEMPT(voluntary)·
Tainted: [L]=SOFTLOCKUP
Hardware name: Red Hat KVM/RHEL-AV, BIOS 0.0.0 02/06/2015
RIP: 0010:mpol_shared_policy_lookup+0xd/0x70
Code: e9 b8 b4 ff ff 31 c0 c3 cc cc cc cc 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 66 0f 1f 00 0f 1f 44 00 00 41 54 55 53 <48> 8b 1f 48 85 db 74 41 4c 8d 67 08 48 89 fb 48 89 f5 4c 89 e7 e8
RSP: 0018:ffffc90002b1fc28 EFLAGS: 00000202
RAX: 00000000001c20ca RBX: 0000000000724e1e RCX: 0000000000000001
RDX: ffff888118e214c8 RSI: 0000000000057d42 RDI: ffff888118e21518
RBP: 000000000002bec8 R08: 0000000000000001 R09: 0000000000000000
R10: 0000000000000bf4 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: 0000000000000001
R13: 00000000001c20ca R14: 00000000001c20ca R15: 0000000000000000
FS:  00007f03f995c740(0000) GS:ffff88a07ad9a000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
CR2: 00007f03f98f1000 CR3: 0000000144626004 CR4: 0000000000770eb0
DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000fffe0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
PKRU: 55555554
Call Trace:
 <TASK>
 shmem_alloc_folio+0x31/0xc0
 shmem_swapin_folio+0x309/0xcf0
 ? filemap_get_entry+0x117/0x1e0
 ? xas_load+0xd/0xb0
 ? filemap_get_entry+0x101/0x1e0
 shmem_get_folio_gfp+0x2ed/0x5b0
 shmem_file_read_iter+0x7f/0x2e0
 vfs_read+0x252/0x330
 ksys_read+0x68/0xf0
 do_syscall_64+0x4c/0x1c0
 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e
RIP: 0033:0x7f03f9a46991
Code: 00 48 8b 15 81 14 10 00 f7 d8 64 89 02 b8 ff ff ff ff eb bd e8 20 ad 01 00 f3 0f 1e fa 80 3d 35 97 10 00 00 74 13 31 c0 0f 05 <48> 3d 00 f0 ff ff 77 4f c3 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 55 48 89 e5 48 83 ec
RSP: 002b:00007fff3c52bd28 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000000
RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 0000000000040000 RCX: 00007f03f9a46991
RDX: 0000000000040000 RSI: 00007f03f98ba000 RDI: 0000000000000003
RBP: 00007fff3c52bd50 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: 00007f03f9b9a380
R10: 0000000000000022 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 0000000000040000
R13: 00007f03f98ba000 R14: 0000000000000003 R15: 0000000000000000
 </TASK>

The reason is simple, readahead brought some order 0 folio in swap cache,
and the swapin mTHP folio being allocated is in conflict with it, so
swapcache_prepare fails and causes shmem_swap_alloc_folio to return
-EEXIST, and shmem simply retries again and again causing this loop.

Fix it by applying a similar fix for anon mTHP swapin.

The performance change is very slight, time of swapin 10g zero folios
with shmem (test for 12 times):
Before:  2.47s
After:   2.48s

[kasong@tencent.com: add comment]

Weakness: CWE-667 (Improper Locking)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38241?

It affects 1 product.


Products: Linux kernel.

## How do I fix CVE-2025-38241?

Apply the vendor's patch.

## Is CVE-2025-38241 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38241 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

- [CVE-2026-53266](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-53266/): Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write (high 8.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2013-6282](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2013-6282/): Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation (high 8.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2022-0185](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2022-0185/): Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow (high 8.4, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2013-2094](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2013-2094/): Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation (high 8.4, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2026-53362](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-53362/): Linux Kernel Unspecified (high 7.8, exploited in the wild)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2025-38241 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2025-38241 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 9 Jul 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38241 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Linux kernel. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-38241/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-38241/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-38241
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-38241
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2025-38241

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-38241/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.