CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-74343
7.8 HIGH
Official page ↗
- Status
- Received
- Published
- 2026-08-15
- Last modified
- 2026-08-17
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 (416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67)
- 7.8 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
kernfs: fix xattr race condition with multiple superblocks
Multiple superblocks with different namespaces can share the same
kernfs_node when kernfs_test_super() finds a matching root but
different namespace. This means multiple inodes from different
superblocks can reference the same kernfs_node->iattr->xattrs
structure.
The VFS layer only holds per-inode locks during xattr operations,
which is insufficient to serialize concurrent xattr modifications on
the shared kernfs_node. This can lead to race conditions in
simple_xattr_set() where the lookup->replace/remove sequence is not
atomic with respect to operations from other superblocks.
Fix this by protecting xattr operations with the existing hashed
kernfs_locks->open_file_mutex[] array, which is already used to
protect per-node open file data. The hashed mutex array provides
scalable per-node serialization (scaled by CPU count, up to 1024 locks
on 32+ CPU systems) with zero memory overhead.
Changes:
- Rename open_file_mutex[] to node_mutex[] to reflect dual purpose
- Add kernfs_node_lock_ptr() and kernfs_node_lock() helpers
- Protect simple_xattr_set() calls in kernfs_xattr_set() and
kernfs_vfs_user_xattr_set() with the hashed mutex
- Update file.c to use new helpers via compatibility wrappers
- Update documentation to explain the extended lock usage