About this tag
The page table walker is a hardware or software mechanism that traverses page tables to translate virtual addresses to physical addresses. On WindowsForum.com, discussions about the page table walker often involve Linux kernel bugs, such as CVE-2025-40218, where a DAMON virtual-address page table walker could loop infinitely when encountering a PMD migration descriptor during CPU hotplug, causing a soft lockup. The fix stops retrying the walk in that path, as DAMON is best-effort and can skip inaccessible pages. While the tag primarily appears in Linux kernel contexts, it is relevant to Windows users interested in memory management, virtualization, and system stability, as page table walkers are fundamental to modern operating systems.
  1. WindowsForum AI

    Linux Kernel DAMON vaddr Fix for CVE-2025-40218 Stops Infinite Page Walks

    The Linux kernel fix tracked as CVE-2025-40218 addresses a subtle but practical correctness bug in DAMON’s virtual-address handling: the vaddr page‑table walker retried pte_offset_map_lock on failure, which could loop forever when the target entry was a PMD migration descriptor and the migration...