If mpol_new is allocated but not used in restart loop, mpol_new will be freed via mpol_put before returning to the caller. But refcnt is not initialized yet, so mpol_put could not do the right things and might leak the unused mpol_new. This issue could be triggered easily with the below code snippet if there're many processes doing the below work at the same time: shmid = shmget((key_t)5566, 1024 * PAGE_SIZE, 0666|IPC_CREAT); shm = shmat(shmid, 0, 0); loop many times { mbind(shm, 1024 * PAGE_SIZE, MPOL_LOCAL, mask, maxnode, 0); mbind(shm + 128 * PAGE_SIZE, 128 * PAGE_SIZE, MPOL_DEFAULT, mask, maxnode, 0); } Fixes: 42288fe366c4 ("mm: mempolicy: Convert shared_policy mutex to spinlock") Signed-off-by: Miaohe Lin <linmiaohe@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> # 3.8 --- v1->v2: Add reproducer snippet and Cc stable. Thanks Michal Hocko for review and comment! --- mm/mempolicy.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/mm/mempolicy.c b/mm/mempolicy.c index a2516d31db6c..4cdd425b2752 100644 --- a/mm/mempolicy.c +++ b/mm/mempolicy.c @@ -2733,6 +2733,7 @@ static int shared_policy_replace(struct shared_policy *sp, unsigned long start, mpol_new = kmem_cache_alloc(policy_cache, GFP_KERNEL); if (!mpol_new) goto err_out; + refcount_set(&mpol_new->refcnt, 1); goto restart; } -- 2.23.0