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The Wire · Showcase

KVM HALTS UNDER CET VIRTUALIZATION — WORKAROUND LIVE

By RepoJournal · Filed · About Linux

Virtualized Control Enforcement Technology is hanging production hosts, and the kernel just gave you an off switch.

Paolo Bonzini merged emergency KVM fixes overnight, including a critical module parameter to disable CET virtualization entirely [1]. Host hangs tied to CET have been reported in the field, and rather than burn cycles on root cause analysis mid-cycle, maintainers chose the safer path: let operators kill the feature until it's bulletproof [1]. The same merge window brought arm64 pKVM improvements [2] addressing erratum 4193714, guest memory handling under nested virtualization, and a steal-time selftest fix — all essential for ARM deployments. Separately, liveupdate fixes landed [3] tightening kexec handover validation, fixing memfd preservation error handling, and preventing overflows when preserving memfds that exceed UINT_MAX page counts. If you're running virtualization at scale, this is a red flag on CET. If you're shipping arm64 guests or using liveupdate for zero-downtime patching, test these merges before rolling forward.

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Action items

References

  1. [1] KVM: VMX: introduce module parameter to disable CET torvalds/linux
  2. [2] Merge tag 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/virt/kvm/kvm torvalds/linux
  3. [3] Merge tag 'fixes-2026-05-13' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/liveupdate/linux torvalds/linux

Quick answers

What shipped in Linux on May 14, 2026?
Virtualized Control Enforcement Technology is hanging production hosts, and the kernel just gave you an off switch. In total, 3 commits landed.
What were the notable Linux updates?
KVM: VMX: introduce module parameter to disable CET, Merge tag 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/virt/kvm/kvm, and Merge tag 'fixes-2026-05-13' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/liveupdate/linux.

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