vulnerability
Debian: CVE-2025-40190: linux, linux-6.1 -- security update
| Severity | CVSS | Published | Added | Modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | (AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:N/A:C) | Nov 14, 2025 | Nov 14, 2025 | Dec 17, 2025 |
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: guard against EA inode refcount underflow in xattr update syzkaller found a path where ext4_xattr_inode_update_ref() reads an EA inode refcount that is already <= 0 and then applies ref_change (often -1). That lets the refcount underflow and we proceed with a bogus value, triggering errors like: EXT4-fs error: EA inode <n> ref underflow: ref_count=-1 ref_change=-1 EXT4-fs warning: ea_inode dec ref err=-117 Make the invariant explicit: if the current refcount is non-positive, treat this as on-disk corruption, emit ext4_error_inode(), and fail the operation with -EFSCORRUPTED instead of updating the refcount. Delete the WARN_ONCE() as negative refcounts are now impossible; keep error reporting in ext4_error_inode(). This prevents the underflow and the follow-on orphan/cleanup churn.
Solutions
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