Bug 2373348 (CVE-2025-38066)

Summary: CVE-2025-38066 kernel: dm cache: prevent BUG_ON by blocking retries on failed device resumes
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 10:02:52 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

dm cache: prevent BUG_ON by blocking retries on failed device resumes

A cache device failing to resume due to mapping errors should not be
retried, as the failure leaves a partially initialized policy object.
Repeating the resume operation risks triggering BUG_ON when reloading
cache mappings into the incomplete policy object.

Reproduce steps:

1. create a cache metadata consisting of 512 or more cache blocks,
   with some mappings stored in the first array block of the mapping
   array. Here we use cache_restore v1.0 to build the metadata.

cat <<EOF >> cmeta.xml
<superblock uuid="" block_size="128" nr_cache_blocks="512" \
policy="smq" hint_width="4">
  <mappings>
    <mapping cache_block="0" origin_block="0" dirty="false"/>
  </mappings>
</superblock>
EOF
dmsetup create cmeta --table "0 8192 linear /dev/sdc 0"
cache_restore -i cmeta.xml -o /dev/mapper/cmeta --metadata-version=2
dmsetup remove cmeta

2. wipe the second array block of the mapping array to simulate
   data degradations.

mapping_root=$(dd if=/dev/sdc bs=1c count=8 skip=192 \
2>/dev/null | hexdump -e '1/8 "%u\n"')
ablock=$(dd if=/dev/sdc bs=1c count=8 skip=$((4096*mapping_root+2056)) \
2>/dev/null | hexdump -e '1/8 "%u\n"')
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4k count=1 seek=$ablock

3. try bringing up the cache device. The resume is expected to fail
   due to the broken array block.

dmsetup create cmeta --table "0 8192 linear /dev/sdc 0"
dmsetup create cdata --table "0 65536 linear /dev/sdc 8192"
dmsetup create corig --table "0 524288 linear /dev/sdc 262144"
dmsetup create cache --notable
dmsetup load cache --table "0 524288 cache /dev/mapper/cmeta \
/dev/mapper/cdata /dev/mapper/corig 128 2 metadata2 writethrough smq 0"
dmsetup resume cache

4. try resuming the cache again. An unexpected BUG_ON is triggered
   while loading cache mappings.

dmsetup resume cache

Kernel logs:

(snip)
------------[ cut here ]------------
kernel BUG at drivers/md/dm-cache-policy-smq.c:752!
Oops: invalid opcode: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP KASAN NOPTI
CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 332 Comm: dmsetup Not tainted 6.13.4 #3
RIP: 0010:smq_load_mapping+0x3e5/0x570

Fix by disallowing resume operations for devices that failed the
initial attempt.

Comment 1 Avinash Hanwate 2025-06-20 20:18:39 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025061837-CVE-2025-38066-b3f6@gregkh/T