CVE-2026-92502

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

ext4: clear stale xarray tags on folios skipped during writeback

In data=journal mode, the writeback thread can hit the WARN_ON_ONCE(sb_rdonly(sb)) in ext4_journal_check_start() while the superblock is being remounted read-only during reboot:

Workqueue: writeback wb_workfn (flush-253:0) RIP: 0010:ext4_journal_check_start+0x8b/0xd0 Call Trace: __ext4_journal_start_sb+0x3c/0x1e0 mpage_prepare_extent_to_map+0x4af/0x580 ext4_do_writepages+0x3c0/0x1080 ext4_writepages+0xc8/0x1a0 do_writepages+0xc4/0x180 __writeback_single_inode+0x45/0x2f0 writeback_sb_inodes+0x26b/0x5d0 __writeback_inodes_wb+0x54/0x100 wb_writeback+0x1ac/0x320 wb_workfn+0x394/0x470

And followed by the warning: EXT4-fs warning (device vda1): ext4_evict_inode:195: inode #6263: comm (sd-umount): data will be lost

This issue is not reproduced every time, but frequently. The reproduction step is to create a VM with 8 CPUs, 16G memory and setup data=journal: sudo tune2fs -o journal_data /dev/vda1 Run fio: rm -f fiotest fio –name=fiotest –rw=randwrite –bs=4k –runtime=6 –ioengine=libaio –iodepth=256 –numjobs=8 –filename=fiotest –filesize=30G –group_reporting Reboot the VM, and check the console output from: virsh console testvm

But there is no dirty inode, folio_clear_dirty_for_io clears PG_dirty but leaves tags PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY and PAGECACHE_TAG_TOWRITE set which are only cleared by __folio_start_writeback. In data=journal mode, jbd2 checkpoints the journalled data to its final location and clears its own dirty flag without touching folio PG_dirty or xarray dirty flags. The commit f4a2b42e7891 (ext4: fix stale xarray tags after writeback) fixes when PG_dirty is still set but there is no dirty page. Another case is PG_dirty is cleared, but PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY and PAGECACHE_TAG_TOWRITE is still set. In this case, writeback thread checks clean folio and skips it in mpage_prepare_extent_to_map: if (!folio_test_dirty(folio) || … folio_unlcok(folio); continue

And never reaches ext4_bio_write_folio where the commit f4a2b42e7891 clears the stale xarray tags. Print debug logs after the filesystem is remounted read-only: writepages RDONLY nrpages=2048 dirtytag=1 wbtag=0 towrite=1 sync=0 And all folios are actually clean: folio idx=3 dirty=0 wb=0 checked=0 dirtybuf=0 jbddirty=0 mapped=1 …

We need to clear the xarray stale tags for such clean folios by cycling them through writeback in the skip path, the same way f4a2b42e7891 does in ext4_bio_write_folio.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/43ae387c3ae6a11227d096669ddf883e27a39a11
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a450ab88bfd57b227d72c7a3faad54d16c3fc099
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/aa0042630b1f7cab735b0a168539281198822586
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ec524aae479b4b2078c47492b90ec21200bce434
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f82a4929d0ef7ddf254c1c295ec1dfd24094f2de