CVE-2026-43053 xfs: close crash window in attr dabtree inactivation
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

xfs: close crash window in attr dabtree inactivation

When inactivating an inode with node-format extended attributes,
xfs_attr3_node_inactive() invalidates all child leaf/node blocks via
xfs_trans_binval(), but intentionally does not remove the corresponding
entries from their parent node blocks.  The implicit assumption is that
xfs_attr_inactive() will truncate the entire attr fork to zero extents
afterwards, so log recovery will never reach the root node and follow
those stale pointers.

However, if a log shutdown occurs after the leaf/node block cancellations
commit but before the attr bmap truncation commits, this assumption
breaks.  Recovery replays the attr bmap intact (the inode still has
attr fork extents), but suppresses replay of all cancelled leaf/node
blocks, maybe leaving them as stale data on disk.  On the next mount,
xlog_recover_process_iunlinks() retries inactivation and attempts to
read the root node via the attr bmap. If the root node was not replayed,
reading the unreplayed root block triggers a metadata verification
failure immediately; if it was replayed, following its child pointers
to unreplayed child blocks triggers the same failure:

 XFS (pmem0): Metadata corruption detected at
 xfs_da3_node_read_verify+0x53/0x220, xfs_da3_node block 0x78
 XFS (pmem0): Unmount and run xfs_repair
 XFS (pmem0): First 128 bytes of corrupted metadata buffer:
 00000000: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000040: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000050: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000060: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 00000070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
 XFS (pmem0): metadata I/O error in "xfs_da_read_buf+0x104/0x190" at daddr 0x78 len 8 error 117

Fix this in two places:

In xfs_attr3_node_inactive(), after calling xfs_trans_binval() on a
child block, immediately remove the entry that references it from the
parent node in the same transaction.  This eliminates the window where
the parent holds a pointer to a cancelled block.  Once all children are
removed, the now-empty root node is converted to a leaf block within the
same transaction. This node-to-leaf conversion is necessary for crash
safety. If the system shutdown after the empty node is written to the
log but before the second-phase bmap truncation commits, log recovery
will attempt to verify the root block on disk. xfs_da3_node_verify()
does not permit a node block with count == 0; such a block will fail
verification and trigger a metadata corruption shutdown. on the other
hand, leaf blocks are allowed to have this transient state.

In xfs_attr_inactive(), split the attr fork truncation into two explicit
phases.  First, truncate all extents beyond the root block (the child
extents whose parent references have already been removed above).
Second, invalidate the root block and truncate the attr bmap to zero in
a single transaction.  The two operations in the second phase must be
atomic: as long as the attr bmap has any non-zero length, recovery can
follow it to the root block, so the root block invalidation must commit
together with the bmap-to-zero truncation.
Affected products: vendor: Linux
product: Linux
default_status: unaffected
vendor: Linux
product: Linux
default_status: affected
Published: 2026-05-01T14:15:46.709Z