vulnerability

Debian: CVE-2025-38073: linux -- security update

Severity
4
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:M/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
Jun 18, 2025
Added
Jun 20, 2025
Modified
Nov 18, 2025

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

block: fix race between set_blocksize and read paths

With the new large sector size support, it's now the case that
set_blocksize can change i_blksize and the folio order in a manner that
conflicts with a concurrent reader and causes a kernel crash.

Specifically, let's say that udev-worker calls libblkid to detect the
labels on a block device. The read call can create an order-0 folio to
read the first 4096 bytes from the disk. But then udev is preempted.

Next, someone tries to mount an 8k-sectorsize filesystem from the same
block device. The filesystem calls set_blksize, which sets i_blksize to
8192 and the minimum folio order to 1.

Now udev resumes, still holding the order-0 folio it allocated. It then
tries to schedule a read bio and do_mpage_readahead tries to create
bufferheads for the folio. Unfortunately, blocks_per_folio == 0 because
the page size is 4096 but the blocksize is 8192 so no bufferheads are
attached and the bh walk never sets bdev. We then submit the bio with a
NULL block device and crash.

Therefore, truncate the page cache after flushing but before updating
i_blksize. However, that's not enough -- we also need to lock out file
IO and page faults during the update. Take both the i_rwsem and the
invalidate_lock in exclusive mode for invalidations, and in shared mode
for read/write operations.

I don't know if this is the correct fix, but xfs/259 found it.

Solution

no-fix-debian-deb-package
Title
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