[PATCH v2 3/5] arm64: kexec_file: Fix image->elf_headers memory leak in retry loop

Jinjie Ruan ruanjinjie at huawei.com
Tue Jul 28 20:12:33 PDT 2026


If load_other_segments() fails after image->elf_headers is assigned,
the memory lifecycle is safely managed by the global kimage object
and will be freed in arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup().

However, during a retry loop in image_load(), a subsequent iteration
will allocate a new buffer and overwrite image->elf_headers. This
permanently leaks the stale memory from the previous iteration before
the global cleanup can track it.

Fix this by explicitly freeing the stale `image->elf_headers` buffer
before assigning the newly allocated headers.

Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will at kernel.org>
Cc: Thomas Huth <thuth at redhat.com>
Cc: Breno Leitao <leitao at debian.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm at linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Yeoreum Yun <yeoreum.yun at arm.com>
Cc: Baoquan He <bhe at redhat.com>
Cc: stable at vger.kernel.org
Fixes: 108aa503657e ("arm64: kexec_file: try more regions if loading segments fails")
Signed-off-by: Jinjie Ruan <ruanjinjie at huawei.com>
---
 arch/arm64/kernel/machine_kexec_file.c | 4 ++++
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/kernel/machine_kexec_file.c b/arch/arm64/kernel/machine_kexec_file.c
index e48f29167b38..2f750e5f4fcc 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/kernel/machine_kexec_file.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/kernel/machine_kexec_file.c
@@ -112,6 +112,10 @@ int load_other_segments(struct kimage *image,
 			vfree(headers);
 			goto out_err;
 		}
+
+		if (unlikely(image->elf_headers))
+			vfree(image->elf_headers);
+
 		image->elf_headers = headers;
 		image->elf_load_addr = kbuf.mem;
 		image->elf_headers_sz = headers_sz;
-- 
2.34.1




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