CVE-2024-35956

btrfs: qgroup: fix qgroup prealloc rsv leak in subvolume operations

Published May 20, 2024 CVSS 3.1 · 5.5 Medium EPSS < 1% KEV · Not listed
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

btrfs: qgroup: fix qgroup prealloc rsv leak in subvolume operations

Create subvolume, create snapshot and delete subvolume all use
btrfs_subvolume_reserve_metadata() to reserve metadata for the changes
done to the parent subvolume's fs tree, which cannot be mediated in the
normal way via start_transaction. When quota groups (squota or qgroups)
are enabled, this reserves qgroup metadata of type PREALLOC. Once the
operation is associated to a transaction, we convert PREALLOC to
PERTRANS, which gets cleared in bulk at the end of the transaction.

However, the error paths of these three operations were not implementing
this lifecycle correctly. They unconditionally converted the PREALLOC to
PERTRANS in a generic cleanup step regardless of errors or whether the
operation was fully associated to a transaction or not. This resulted in
error paths occasionally converting this rsv to PERTRANS without calling
record_root_in_trans successfully, which meant that unless that root got
recorded in the transaction by some other thread, the end of the
transaction would not free that root's PERTRANS, leaking it. Ultimately,
this resulted in hitting a WARN in CONFIG_BTRFS_DEBUG builds at unmount
for the leaked reservation.

The fix is to ensure that every qgroup PREALLOC reservation observes the
following properties:

1. any failure before record_root_in_trans is called successfully
results in freeing the PREALLOC reservation.
2. after record_root_in_trans, we convert to PERTRANS, and now the
transaction owns freeing the reservation.

This patch enforces those properties on the three operations. Without
it, generic/269 with squotas enabled at mkfs time would fail in ~5-10
runs on my system. With this patch, it ran successfully 1000 times in a
row.

Remediation

No solution or workaround provided in the CVE record

Tracking

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Advisories

Source ID Title
Debian DLA Debian DLA DLA-4076-1 linux-6.1 security update
Ubuntu USN Ubuntu USN USN-6893-1 Linux kernel vulnerabilities
Ubuntu USN Ubuntu USN USN-6893-2 Linux kernel vulnerabilities
Ubuntu USN Ubuntu USN USN-6893-3 Linux kernel vulnerabilities
Ubuntu USN Ubuntu USN USN-6918-1 Linux kernel vulnerabilities
History
Type Values Removed Values Added
Weaknesses CWE-401
CPEs cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.9:rc1:*:*:*:*:*:*
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.9:rc2:*:*:*:*:*:*
cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:6.9:rc3:*:*:*:*:*:*
Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
Linux
Published
Updated
May 23, 2026, 3:45 PM
Reserved
May 17, 2024, 1:50 PM
Status
Modified
Published
May 20, 2024, 10:15 AM
Modified
Jun 17, 2026, 7:35 AM
Severity
Low
Public date
May 20, 2024, 12:00 AM