Bug 2541430 (CVE-2026-100073)

Summary: CVE-2026-100073 kernel: ext4: fix transaction overflow during writeback
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's ext4 file system. When saving modified memory pages back to storage, the system underestimates the journal transaction space required to split and update file block mappings. A local user could exploit this flaw by performing specific write operations, triggering a transaction overflow that leads to a Denial of Service (DoS) through a kernel crash or file system error.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-25 13:38:07 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ext4: fix transaction overflow during writeback

Commit 95ad8ee45cdb ("ext4: correct the reserved credits for extent
conversion") was correct to note that we need to reserve enough credits
for all extents possibly underlying a large folio. However it was too
eager to reduce the number of reserved credits. Extent conversion may
not only need to touch several leaf extent blocks, it may also need to
split extents - for example a single large unwritten extent may need to
be split into many small written ones in case of sparse folio dirtying.
This can thus result not only in extent leaf modifications but also in a
need to allocate new extent tree nodes. As a result the reserved
transaction credits were not sufficient in some corner cases. Use
ext4_meta_trans_blocks() for correct upper bound credit estimate.