In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/page_alloc: clear page-private in free_pages_prepare() Several subsystems (slub, shmem, ttm, etc.) use page-private but don't clear it before freeing pages. When these pages are later allocated as high-order pages and split via split_page(), tail pages retain stale page-private values. This causes a use-after-free in the swap subsystem.

The swap code uses page-private to track swap count continuations, assuming freshly allocated pages have page-private == 0. When stale values are present, swap_count_continued() incorrectly assumes the continuation list is valid and iterates over uninitialized page-lru containing LIST_POISON values, causing a crash: KASAN: maybe wild-memory-access in range [0xdead000000000100-0xdead000000000107] RIP: 0010:__do_sys_swapoff+0x1151/0x1860 Fix this by clearing page-private in free_pages_prepare(), ensuring all freed pages have clean state regardless of previous use.