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

resource: fix region_intersects() vs add_memory_driver_managed()

On a system with CXL memory, the resource tree (/proc/iomem) related to
CXL memory may look like something as follows.

490000000-50fffffff : CXL Window 0
490000000-50fffffff : region0

490000000-50fffffff : dax0.0
  490000000-50fffffff : System RAM (kmem)

Because drivers/dax/kmem.c calls add_memory_driver_managed() during
onlining CXL memory, which makes “System RAM (kmem)” a descendant of “CXL
Window X”. This confuses region_intersects(), which expects all “System
RAM” resources to be at the top level of iomem_resource. This can lead to
bugs.

For example, when the following command line is executed to write some
memory in CXL memory range via /dev/mem,

\( dd if=data of=/dev/mem bs=\)((1 << 10)) seek=$((0x490000000 >> 10)) count=1
dd: error writing ‘/dev/mem’: Bad address
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes copied, 0.0283507 s, 0.0 kB/s

the command fails as expected. However, the error code is wrong. It
should be “Operation not permitted” instead of “Bad address”. More
seriously, the /dev/mem permission checking in devmem_is_allowed() passes
incorrectly. Although the accessing is prevented later because ioremap()
isn’t allowed to map system RAM, it is a potential security issue. During
command executing, the following warning is reported in the kernel log for
calling ioremap() on system RAM.

ioremap on RAM at 0x0000000490000000 – 0x0000000490000fff
WARNING: CPU: 2 PID: 416 at arch/x86/mm/ioremap.c:216 __ioremap_caller.constprop.0+0x131/0x35d
Call Trace:
memremap+0xcb/0x184
xlate_dev_mem_ptr+0x25/0x2f
write_mem+0x94/0xfb
vfs_write+0x128/0x26d
ksys_write+0xac/0xfe
do_syscall_64+0x9a/0xfd
entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53

The details of command execution process are as follows. In the above
resource tree, “System RAM” is a descendant of “CXL Window 0” instead of a
top level resource. So, region_intersects() will report no System RAM
resources in the CXL memory region incorrectly, because it only checks the
top level resources. Consequently, devmem_is_allowed() will return 1
(allow access via /dev/mem) for CXL memory region incorrectly.
Fortunately, ioremap() doesn’t allow to map System RAM and reject the
access.

So, region_intersects() needs to be fixed to work correctly with the
resource tree with “System RAM” not at top level as above. To fix it, if
we found a unmatched resource in the top level, we will continue to search
matched resources in its descendant resources. So, we will not miss any
matched resources in resource tree anymore.

In the new implementation, an example resource tree

|——————– “CXL Window 0” ——————|
|— “System RAM” —|

will behave similar as the following fake resource tree for
region_intersects(, IORESOURCE_SYSTEM_RAM, ),

|— “System RAM” —||— “CXL Window 0a” —|

Where “CXL Window 0a” is part of the original “CXL Window 0” that
isn’t covered by “System RAM”.