CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-45892
5.5 MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Status
- Analyzed
- Published
- 2026-05-27
- Last modified
- 2026-06-25
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 5.5 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout
When splitting an unwritten extent in the middle and converting it to
initialized in ext4_split_extent() with the EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT and
EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flags set, it could leave a stale unwritten extent.
Assume we have an unwritten file and buffered write in the middle of it
without dioread_nolock enabled, it will allocate blocks as written
extent.
0 A B N
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent U: unwritten extent
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDD--] D: valid data
|<- ->| ----> this range needs to be initialized
ext4_split_extent() first try to split this extent at B with
EXT4_EXT_DATA_PARTIAL_VALID1 and EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT flag set, but
ext4_split_extent_at() failed to split this extent due to temporary lack
of space. It zeroout B to N and leave the entire extent as unwritten.
0 A B N
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDDZZ] Z: zeroed data
ext4_split_extent() then try to split this extent at A with
EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flag set. This time, it split successfully and
leave an written extent from A to N.
0 A B N
[UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDDZZ]
Finally ext4_map_create_blocks() only insert extent A to B to the extent
status tree, and leave an stale unwritten extent in the status tree.
0 A B N
[UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent
[UUWWWWWWWWUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDDZZ]
Fix this issue by always cached extent status entry after zeroing out
the second part.
Affected configurations
• linux linux kernel 6.1.167
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/28db4bfc6f82fd20e2aadb7fc162244109a4eb31 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6d882ea3b0931b43530d44149b79fcd4ffc13030 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a1b962a821e7a52d48212ae269b45808b4411267 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c2ee51d684adca7645e4aa74adca13f6750390bc Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d8ee559fccdef713f058cfe5f2c03dc9b18be3b1 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f0931a5c17005a0c4fc35bd1a001245effc3354b Patch