An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel 3.2 through 5.10.16, as used by Xen. Grant mapping operations often occur in batch hypercalls, where a number of operations are done in a single hypercall, the success or failure of each one is reported to the backend driver, and the backend driver then loops over the results, performing follow-up actions based on the success or failure of each operation. Unfortunately, when running in PV mode, the Linux backend drivers mishandle this: Some errors are ignored, effectively implying their success from the success of related batch elements.

In other cases, errors resulting from one batch element lead to further batch elements not being inspected, and hence successful ones to not be possible to properly unmap upon error recovery. Only systems with Linux backends running in PV mode are vulnerable. Linux backends run in HVM / PVH modes are not vulnerable.

This affects arch/*/xen/p2m.c and drivers/xen/gntdev.c.