CVE-2026-98468 KVM: arm64: Fix spurious warning for benign stage 2 teardown race

Q: Is CVE-2026-98468 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-98468 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Not scored Published 18 Oct 2026 Updated 19 Oct 2026

A race condition in Linux KVM arm64 stage 2 teardown can trigger spurious kernel warnings, potentially leading to denial of service under memory pressure.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2026-98468?

CVE-2026-98468 is a vulnerability in Linux, published on 18 Oct 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:

KVM: arm64: Fix spurious warning for benign stage 2 teardown race

kvmtool was used to establish an L1 guest with 8 CPUs and 8 GiB of RAM, an L2 guest with 4 CPUs and 4 GiB of RAM and an L3 guest with 2 CPUs and 2 GiB of RAM, all of which was then exited.

Under memory pressure in the L0 host warnings were observed due to migration triggered by compaction:

WARNING: arch/arm64/kvm/mmu.c:336 at __unmap_stage2_range+0x64/0x80, CPU#5: kcompactd0/66

Which was, in turn, triggered by an MMU notifier for the host invalidation:

mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start() -> ... -> kvm_mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start() -> kvm_mmu_unmap_gfn_range() -> kvm_unmap_gfn_range() -> kvm_nested_s2_unmap() -> kvm_stage2_unmap_range() -> __unmap_stage2_range() -> stage2_apply_range() <- -EINVAL, triggering a WARN_ON()

Racing with L0's teardown of stage 2 page tables:

exit_mm() -> mmput() -> __mmput() -> exit_mmap() -> mmu_notifier_release() -> ... -> kvm_mmu_notifier_release() -> kvm_flush_shadow_all() -> kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all() -> kvm_free_stage2_pgd() -> [ acquire kvm->mmu_lock for write ] -> mmu->pgt = NULL [ among other tasks ] -> [ release kvm->mmu_lock for write ]

It turns out there is a benign race resulting in a spurious warning:

Thread A - notify: migration | Thread B - notify: release -------------------------------|--------------------------------- < kvm->mmu_lock held > | stage2_apply_range() | get mmu->pgt, check !NULL | ... | kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all() cond_resched_rwlock_write(); | < contend, sleep kvm->mmu_lock > < drop kvm->mmu_lock > | < acquire kvm->mmu_lock> | ... | kvm_free_stage2_pgd() | mmu->pgt = NULL | < invalidate MMU > | ... | < release kvm->mmu_lock > [ scheduled ] | stage2_apply_range() | < loop to next > | get, mmu->pgt, check !NULL | is NULL, return -EINVAL | __unmap_stage2_range() | WARN_ON(-EINVAL) <--- entirely spurious - the race was handled correctly.

Fix the spurious warning by updating stage2_apply_range() to no longer treat concurrent PGT teardown on lock release as an error - whether the walker is tearing down page tables or doing something else this is a legitimate reason to abort the operation without error.

This keeps the warning in place for all other circumstances.

In practice only __unmap_stage2_range() actually does anything with the error so this only impacts that.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-98468?

How do I fix CVE-2026-98468?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2026-98468 being exploited?