CVE-2026-90047: drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM

Published Sep 16, 2026
·
Updated

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM

getflatccsoffset() reads the base of the flat CCS storage from the hardware, scales it by the number of enabled L3 nodes, and rounds the result up to 128K. Everything below that offset is then handed to the VRAM allocator as usable memory.

Rounding a limit that means "usable memory ends here" upwards publishes whatever lies between the real base and the rounded one as free memory, and that memory belongs to the compression hardware. The scaled value has no reason to be 128K aligned, and on a Battlemage G21 with 16 GiB it is not:

flat CCS base: raw 0x3fafff800, rounded 0x3fb000000

so the last 2 KiB of page 0x3fafff000 is CCS storage, in the allocator's pool. Whatever is allocated there gets that tail overwritten by the compression hardware, which needs no page-table entry, no buffer object and no GPU submission to do it, and does it before userspace exists.

On this machine a Mesa VM's level-3 page table landed on that page on every cold boot. It lost the entry covering the compositor's batch-buffer heap, so the compositor's first submission faulted fetching its batch and gdm restarted it forever: a black screen on an otherwise working machine. Restarting gdm cleared it because the next VM's page tables were allocated somewhere else.

Round down instead, to the page size the allocator works in. On this machine that excludes exactly one page.

Reading the reserved page afterwards shows what had been writing it:

[369] 0xcccc000000000000 [371] 0xcc77000000000000 [373] 0xcccc000000000000 [375] 0xcc77000000000000

compression metadata, two bytes per sixteen, sitting where the driver used to hand out memory.

The assertion that should have caught this compares the offset against GSMBASE - ccssize for equality. That value is 128K aligned, so it agrees with the rounded-up offset precisely when the base is not aligned - the check cannot fail in the case it exists to catch, and is compiled out unless CONFIGDRMXEDEBUG is set. Replace it with one that can fail: CCS storage must not run into GSM.

[ And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "roundup()" to a "rounddown()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]

Affected Software

1 affected component
Linux Kernel

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

  1. Configuration

    Enable CONFIG_DRM_XE_DEBUG (the text notes the debug code is compiled out unless CONFIG_DRM_XE_DEBUG is set) if you need the additional drm/xe debug instrumentation described.

    Linux kernel DRM XE CONFIG_DRM_XE_DEBUG = set (enabled)

Event History

Sep 16, 2026
CVE Published
via MITRE·10:33 AM
Data Sourced
via MITRE·10:33 AM
Description

Frequently Asked Questions

1

Which systems are most likely to be affected?

Systems using the Linux kernel drm/xe driver with hardware that exposes flat CCS storage are affected when the computed flat CCS boundary is not 128 KiB aligned. The report demonstrates this on a Battlemage G21 system with 16 GiB of VRAM.

2

Does exploitation require a user process, GPU command submission, or a mapped buffer?

No. The compression hardware can overwrite the incorrectly published memory without a page-table entry, buffer object, or GPU submission, and it can occur before userspace starts.

3

What failure symptoms may indicate the issue?

The corruption can affect allocator-owned data placed in the exposed CCS tail, including GPU page tables. In the reported case, a Mesa VM level-3 page table was corrupted on cold boot, causing the compositor's first submission to fault.

4

Is a workaround described if the kernel fix cannot be deployed immediately?

No workaround is provided in the available information. The referenced stable kernel commits contain the resolved fix.

Contact

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