The mremap syscall is supposed to return a pointer to the new virtual memory area on success, and a negative value of the error code in case of failure. Currently, EFAULT is returned when the VMA is not found, instead of -EFAULT. The users of this syscall will therefore believe the syscall succeeded in case the VMA didn't exist, as it returns a pointer to address 0xe (0xe being the value of EFAULT). This can easily be reproduced by the following C program. I expected mremap to fail, but it does not. If the bug is present, it will print 0xe, otherwise the mremap will fail. The patchset contains two patches: one that fixes the error, and one that adds a small test case. #define _GNU_SOURCE #include <sys/mman.h> #include <stdio.h> int main() { // Get pointer that's definitely not mapped void* ptr = mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0); if (ptr == MAP_FAILED) { perror("mmap"); return 1; } int err = munmap(ptr, 4096); if (err < 0) { perror("munmap"); return 1; } // Remap unexisting VMA ptr = mremap(ptr, 4096, 4096, 0); if (ptr == MAP_FAILED) { perror("mremap"); return 1; } printf("%p\n", ptr); return 0; } Niels Dossche (2): mm: mremap: fix sign for EFAULT error return value selftest/vm: test that mremap fails on non-existent vma mm/mremap.c | 2 +- tools/testing/selftests/vm/hugepage-mremap.c | 6 ++++++ 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) -- 2.35.2