Bug 2373347 (CVE-2025-38073)

Summary: CVE-2025-38073 kernel: block: fix race between set_blocksize and read paths
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: dfreiber, drow, jburrell, vkumar
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-06-18 10:02:49 UTC
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.

Comment 1 Avinash Hanwate 2025-06-20 20:29:41 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025061839-CVE-2025-38073-4f76@gregkh/T