CVE-2026-72027

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's memory management subsystem, specifically within the mm/compaction component. When the free_pages_prepare() function fails, the compaction_free() function does not properly handle this error. This oversight can lead to pages that are either hardware poisoned (PageHWPoison) or otherwise marked as bad (free_page_is_bad()) being returned to the free page pool. Consequently, the reuse of these corrupted pages may lead to data corruption within the system.

This vulnerability is rated as Moderate impact because an attacker requires local access and must encounter rare system conditions, such as underlying hardware memory faults, for faulty memory pages to be improperly returned to service. While physical memory compaction is enabled by default in affected kernel environments, the issue only manifests when low-level page preparation operations encounter errors, constraining the failure mode primarily to system instability or data corruption rather than direct privilege escalation. Earlier enterprise releases do not ship with the affected code path and remain unaffected.

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.