Microsoft security update for CVE-2025-68211
🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)
📋 Microsoft's advisory
EchelonGraph does not copy Microsoft's advisory page: its FAQ and remediation text are not shown here. Read the advisory on https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2025-68211. This page also shows what EchelonGraph holds for CVE-2025-68211, with the description from its CVE record, which the CVE Numbering Authority that assigned the CVE wrote: for a CVE Microsoft assigned, often in the words of Microsoft's own advisory.
🎯 Affected products4
- azl3 kernel 6.6.117.1-1 on Azure Linux 3.0
- azl3 kernel 6.6.119.3-1 on Azure Linux 3.0
- azl3 kernel 6.6.119.3-3 on Azure Linux 3.0
- cbl2 kernel 5.15.186.1-1 on CBL Mariner 2.0
✅ Updates Microsoft lists: 2 updates
2 rows: one per KB article or update, update type and fixed build. Their details are on Microsoft's advisory.
| KB article | Update | Fixed build |
|---|---|---|
| — | Security Update | 5.15.200.1-1 |
| — | Security Update | 6.6.121.1-1 |
🧭 EchelonGraph on CVE-2025-68211
- EchelonGraph score
- 5.5 MEDIUM
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Fix status
- A fix is available — apply it.
Description from the CVE record (CVE.org), as published by its numbering authority
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ksm: use range-walk function to jump over holes in scan_get_next_rmap_item Currently, scan_get_next_rmap_item() walks every page address in a VMA to locate mergeable pages. This becomes highly inefficient when scanning large virtual memory areas that contain mostly unmapped regions, causing ksmd to use large amount of cpu without deduplicating much pages. This patch replaces the per-address lookup with a range walk using walk_page_range(). The range walker allows KSM to skip over entire unmapped holes in a VMA, avoiding unnecessary lookups. This problem was previously discussed in [1]. Consider the following test program which creates a 32 TiB mapping in the virtual address space but only populates a single page: #include <unistd.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <sys/mman.h> /* 32 TiB */ const size_t size = 32ul * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024; int main() { char *area = mmap(NULL, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_NORESERVE | MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANON, -1, 0); if (area == MAP_FAILED) { perror("mmap() failed\n"); return -1; } /* Populate a single page such that we get an anon_vma. */ *area = 0; /* Enable KSM. */ madvise(area, size, MADV_MERGEABLE); pause(); return 0; } $ ./ksm-sparse & $ echo 1 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run Without this patch ksmd uses 100% of the cpu for a long time (more then 1 hour in my test machine) scanning all the 32 TiB virtual address space that contain only one mapped page. This makes ksmd essentially deadlocked not able to deduplicate anything of value. With this patch ksmd walks only the one mapped page and skips the rest of the 32 TiB virtual address space, making the scan fast using little cpu.
Published by kernel.org, the CVE Numbering Authority that assigned CVE-2025-68211, in its CVE record at CVE.org; reused under the CVE Program's Terms of Use (its licence and MITRE's copyright notice are in our Terms of Service).