Red Hat Waived Items

Waived Items is a mechanism offered by Red Hat which allows customers to “waive” and utilize features that are not enabled by default as these are considered as unmaintained, insecure, rudimentary, or deprecated, but are shipped with the RHEL kernel for customer’s convinience only. Waived Items can range from features that can be enabled on demand to specific security mitigations that can be disabled on demand.

To explicitly “waive” any of these items, RHEL offers the rh_waived kernel boot parameter. To allow set of waived items, append rh_waived=<item name>,...,<item name> to the kernel cmdline. Appending rh_waived=features will waive all features listed below, and appending rh_waived=cves will waive all security mitigations listed below.

The waived items listed in the next session follow the pattern below:

• item name

  item description

List of Red Hat Waived Items

• CVE-2025-38085

  Waiving this mitigation can help with addressing perceived performace degradation on some workloads utilizing huge-pages [1] at the expense of re-introducing conditions to allow for the data race that leads to the enumerated common vulnerability. [1] https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7132440