Vulnerability Database

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.