CVE-2016-0617

A resource-management flaw was found in the Linux kernel's hugetlbfs handling of punching holes in hugetlbfs files with either truncate or fallocate. When truncating a hugetlbfs file, this bug could prevent some pages from being unmapped, which panics the system. With fallocate, pages could be prevented from being unmapped and then not removed, or more pages than desired could be unmapped (causing page faults to reestablish the mappings on subsequent page access). A local, non-privileged attacker could exploit this flaw by issuing a sequence of huge-page memory requests that crash the system (denial of service).

This issue does not affect the Linux kernel packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7 and MRG-2, as the code with the flaw is not present in the products listed.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.