CVE-2026-72172 and is rated High severity with a CVSS score of 7.8. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.
CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog
EPSS0.2%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability
Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field
Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships
Overview
What is CVE-2026-72172?
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/mm_init: fix uninitialized struct pages for ZONE_DEVICE
If DAX memory is hotplugged into an unoccupied subsection of an early section, section_activate() reuses the unoptimized boot memmap. However, compound_nr_pages() still assumes that vmemmap optimization is in effect and initializes only the reduced number of struct pages.
As a result, the remaining tail struct pages are left uninitialized, which can later lead to unexpected behavior or crashes.
Fix this by treating early sections as unoptimized when calculating how many struct pages to initialize.