Bug 2376363 (CVE-2025-38220)

Summary:	CVE-2025-38220 kernel: ext4: only dirty folios when data journaling regular files
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	Keywords:	Security
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-07-04 14:01:33 UTC

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

ext4: only dirty folios when data journaling regular files

fstest generic/388 occasionally reproduces a crash that looks as
follows:

BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000
...
Call Trace:
 <TASK>
 ext4_block_zero_page_range+0x30c/0x380 [ext4]
 ext4_truncate+0x436/0x440 [ext4]
 ext4_process_orphan+0x5d/0x110 [ext4]
 ext4_orphan_cleanup+0x124/0x4f0 [ext4]
 ext4_fill_super+0x262d/0x3110 [ext4]
 get_tree_bdev_flags+0x132/0x1d0
 vfs_get_tree+0x26/0xd0
 vfs_cmd_create+0x59/0xe0
 __do_sys_fsconfig+0x4ed/0x6b0
 do_syscall_64+0x82/0x170
 ...

This occurs when processing a symlink inode from the orphan list. The
partial block zeroing code in the truncate path calls
ext4_dirty_journalled_data() -> folio_mark_dirty(). The latter calls
mapping->a_ops->dirty_folio(), but symlink inodes are not assigned an
a_ops vector in ext4, hence the crash.

To avoid this problem, update the ext4_dirty_journalled_data() helper to
only mark the folio dirty on regular files (for which a_ops is
assigned). This also matches the journaling logic in the ext4_symlink()
creation path, where ext4_handle_dirty_metadata() is called directly.

Comment 1 Michal Findra 2025-07-06 08:34:04 UTC

Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025070425-CVE-2025-38220-a235@gregkh/T

Comment 5 errata-xmlrpc 2025-09-02 06:45:24 UTC

This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

Via RHSA-2025:15005 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:15005