CVE-2026-98927 KVM: arm64: nv: Fix life cycle of the nested_mmus array
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-98927?
CVE-2026-98927 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux, published on 23 Oct 2026.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: arm64: nv: Fix life cycle of the nested_mmus array
The nested_mmus array holds the shadow page tables that are used when a guest is running a nested context. These structures are allocated on VCPU_INIT for whole guest, which implies that they may have to be relocated as the array grows.
Should a VCPU_INIT occur whilst a vcpu is actively running an L2 and that the allocation requires relocation, that vcpu will still be running with a pointer to the previous structure, which will have been freed.
Fix this by turning the array of structures to an array of pointers, which is now allocated at VM creation, sized to the absolute maximum that KVM can handle.
In turn, each VCPU_INIT contributes S2_MMU_PER_VCPU to the pool. No reallocation is ever performed, and the life cycle of each object is much clearer:
- the nested_mmus array is allocated in kvm_init_nested(), and freed in kvm_arch_destroy_vm()
- s2_mmu structures are allocated in kvm_vcpu_init_nested(), and freed on kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all()
Finally, the freeing of vcpu->arch.vncr_array is made consistent rather than being done on some failure paths, but not others.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-98927?
How do I fix CVE-2026-98927?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
Is CVE-2026-98927 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-98927 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2026-98927, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-98927, GHSA-2374-8v6x-x95c, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-98927.