CVE-2026-93241

What the bug is

At Meta, we are seeing instances where an OOM killed job is stuck in the exit path for several hours. In one particular case, the job was stuck for more than 8 hours and I had to manually remove the memory.max limits to allow the process to exit. The job was a single process job and had ~55 GiB memory.max and zswap enabled. It had almost 0 anon in memory and ~111 GiB in zswap compressed to ~51 GiB zswap pool (i.e. almost all of memory.current was zswap). Nothing was left on the LRUs to reclaim. On further inspection, I observed ~20k threads of that process stuck with the following stack: [<0>] mem_cgroup_out_of_memory+0x4e/0xa0 [<0>] charge_memcg+0x8bf/0x990 [<0>] mem_cgroup_swapin_charge_folio+0x4e/0x80 [<0>] __read_swap_cache_async+0x10c/0x260 [<0>] swapin_readahead+0x116/0x3f0 [<0>] do_swap_page+0x13c/0x1ce0 [<0>] handle_mm_fault+0x61d/0x11f0 [<0>] do_user_addr_fault+0x3e7/0x6d0 [<0>] exc_page_fault+0x8f/0x110 [<0>] asm_exc_page_fault+0x22/0x30 [<0>] __get_user_8+0x14/0x20 [<0>] futex_cleanup+0x27/0x1c0 [<0>] futex_exit_release+0x47/0x60 [<0>] do_exit+0x107/0x940 [<0>] do_group_exit+0x81/0xa0 [<0>] get_signal+0x2b1/0x6e0 [<0>] arch_do_signal_or_restart+0x1a/0x1c0 [<0>] exit_to_user_mode_loop+0xa8/0x1c0 [<0>] do_syscall_64+0x152/0x250 [<0>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53 In addition the dmesg was filled with "Out of memory and no killable processes..." messages. I have no idea why oom reaper was not able to reap/unmap the process. My guess is that since oom reaper tries to acquire mmap_lock in read mode limited number of times and then gives up, there might be a thread of that process which had mmap_lock in write mode at that time. My initial suspicion was the futex_cleanup and kernel page fault causing infinite fault and charge retries but that was put to rest in previous discussions happened on similar problem [1]. My current theory is that it is just a simple slow serialization behind the oom_lock. Unlike page allocator, memcg charge code takes the oom_lock without the "try". Though memcg oom code uses mutex_lock_killable(), note that in the call stack get_signal() consumes SIGKILL (or sigdelset(SIGKILL)) before calling do_group_exit(). So this mutex_lock_killable() is just a mutex_lock() here. Therefore 10s of thousands of threads are waiting on oom_lock and one by one they get -EFAULT from get_user() in the futex cleanup code and bails out. Discussion from [1] led to commit a75ffa26122b ("memcg, oom: do not bypass oom killer for dying tasks") which routes dying tasks into the OOM path precisely so the oom_reaper can reap their mm and free the memory asynchronously. But the reaper is best-effort and one-shot: if it cannot take mmap_lock for read (e.g. a sibling thread holds it for write) it sets MMF_OOM_SKIP and never retries, leaving only the glacial oom_lock-serialized synchronous drain. Once MMF_OOM_SKIP is set there is no more asynchronous reclaim coming for the mm, so a dying task charging against it has nothing left to wait for: it frees its memory only once it finishes exiting. Running reclaim and the (no-victim) OOM killer for it is then pointless, and doing it for 10s of thousands of exiting threads is what serializes them behind oom_lock. So before reclaim, if current is an OOM victim whose reaper is done, fail the charge. Reproduced with 20k threads, each parking a robust futex head on its own zswapped page, OOM-group-killed while a sibling holds mmap_lock for write so the reaper gives up and sets MMF_OOM_SKIP. Tested on next-20260728 and baseline show ~90 seconds exit time while with the patch the exit time reduced to ~3 seconds.

Where it lives

The fix touches these files. If the subsystem is one you do not use, the practical exposure is lower, though the package is still the vulnerable one.

mm/memcontrol.c

What this is

CONTROL GROUP - MEMORY RESOURCE CONTROLLER (MEMCG)MAINTAINERS section matched on mm/memcontrol.c · cgroups@vger.kernel.org · Maintained

Check it on the machine

grep -w CONFIG_MEMCG /boot/config-$(uname -r)

Reads the booted kernel's own configuration, on the machine and nowhere else. =y is built in, =m is a module, and an is not set line means the code is not there.

Show whether Debian builds this, per release

Debian builds this code. Every release below compiles the affected file into the kernels it ships.

• bookworm, trixie, forky, sidy

y

built into the kernel image on every flavour - only a patch removes it

Build switch

CONFIG_MEMCG

From the configuration Debian publishes for every kernel flavour it builds. It covers only the architectures Debian ships a linux-config package for, and nothing about a kernel you built yourself. Debian's own status above stays authoritative about the source package.MAINTAINERS kbuild Makefiles Debian linux-config packages

Signals

Published

2026-09-24 (24 days ago)source

CVSS

no vector published, unrated

Attack vector

not published

EPSS

0.23%, higher than 12.8% of all CVEssource

CISA KEV

not listedthe KEV catalogue

Debian urgency

unimportantsource

Subsystem

mm

Upstream fixes

The versions the CNA records as introducing and fixing this, and the commit for each. source

Introduced	Fixed in	Commit
6.16	6.18.51	801bcbdbfd59
6.16	7.2.5	d44c3c5986c7
6.16	7.3	6b0d1083364f