[PATCH] mm/slab: reject unsupported kmalloc sizes

From: Zi Yan

Date: Mon Aug 17 2026 - 16:41:33 EST


kmalloc is used to allocate physically contiguous memory for kernel
allocations. For requests larger than KMALLOC_MAX_CACHE_SIZE, kmalloc uses
the page allocator and can only support up to KMALLOC_MAX_SIZE. For request
sizes bigger than KMALLOC_MAX_SIZE, the page allocator can emit a WARN
because kmalloc allocates an order greater than MAX_PAGE_ORDER. Systems
with panic_on_warn=1 crash because of this WARN. Fix it by rejecting any
kmalloc size bigger than KMALLOC_MAX_SIZE.

Fixes: aadb4bc4a1f9 ("SLUB: direct pass through of page size or higher kmalloc requests")
Reported-by: syzbot+805630f1453e490427fa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/6a820ebc.9ebadd4d.20b15e.001b.GAE@xxxxxxxxxx/
Tested-by: syzbot+805630f1453e490427fa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Zi Yan <ziy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---
It fixes a page allocator warning (order > MAX_PAGE_ORDER) when gadgetfs
requests excessively large memory from kmalloc. Instead of adding
__GFP_NOWARN to suppress the warning, as was done for usbfs[1], change
kmalloc to return NULL without a warning for this specific issue.

[1] commit 4f2629ea67e72 ("USB: usbfs: Don't WARN about excessively large memory allocations")
---
mm/slub.c | 7 ++++++-
1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/slub.c b/mm/slub.c
index 0337e60db5ace..a3071f4ef1945 100644
--- a/mm/slub.c
+++ b/mm/slub.c
@@ -5263,7 +5263,12 @@ static void *___kmalloc_large_node(size_t size, gfp_t flags, int node)
{
struct page *page;
void *ptr = NULL;
- unsigned int order = get_order(size);
+ unsigned int order;
+
+ if (size > KMALLOC_MAX_SIZE)
+ return NULL;
+
+ order = get_order(size);

if (unlikely(flags & GFP_SLAB_BUG_MASK))
flags = kmalloc_fix_flags(flags);

---
base-commit: 8d3ae59288f1e7d58d76558a6ee96d533bc5019f
change-id: 20260817-limit_kmalloc_size-3a4a2c73beac

Best regards,
--
Yan, Zi