CVE-2026-64149 dma-mapping: move dma_map_resource() sanity check into debug code

Medium 5.5 Published Updated

A false positive in the Linux kernel DMA mapping sanity check causes unnecessary warnings and mapping errors on ARM64 systems, potentially disrupting device drivers.

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

What is CVE-2026-64149?

CVE-2026-64149 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 19 Jul 2026. 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:

dma-mapping: move dma_map_resource() sanity check into debug code

dma_map_resource() uses pfn_valid() to ensure the range is not RAM. However, pfn_valid() only checks for availability of the memory map for a PFN but it does not ensure that the PFN is actually backed by RAM. On ARM64 with SPARSEMEM (128MB section granularity), MMIO addresses that share a section with RAM will falsely trigger the WARN_ON_ONCE and cause dma_map_resource() to return DMA_MAPPING_ERROR.

This causes a WARNING on Raspberry Pi 4 during spi_bcm2835 probe because the SPI FIFO register (0xfe204004) falls in the same sparsemem section as the end of RAM (0xf8000000-0xfbffffff), both in section 31 (0xf8000000-0xffffffff).

Move the sanity check from dma_map_resource() into debug_dma_map_phys() and replace the unreliable pfn_valid() with pfn_valid() && !PageReserved(), which correctly identifies actual usable RAM without false positives for MMIO regions that happen to have struct pages.

Since dma_map_resource() is dma_map_phys(DMA_ATTR_MMIO), the check applies equally to both APIs. Any non-reserved page represents kernel memory to a sufficient degree that using DMA_ATTR_MMIO on it is almost certainly wrong and risks breaking coherency on non-coherent platforms. ZONE_DEVICE pages used for PCI P2P DMA (MEMORY_DEVICE_PCI_P2PDMA) have PageReserved set, so they will not trigger a false positive.

The check no longer blocks the mapping and uses err_printk() to integrate with dma-debug filtering.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-64149?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-64149?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2026-64149 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-64149 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as BELL-CVE-2026-64149, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-64149, GHSA-pxq7-6qx3-6gp9, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-64149.

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