What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-54185: btrfs: remove BUG_ON()'s in add_new_free_space()

• Severity: unknown
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-12-30 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: remove BUG_ON()'s in add_new_free_space() At add_new_free_space() we have these BUG_ON()'s that are there to deal with any failure to add free space to the in memory free space cache. Such failures are mostly -ENOMEM that should be very rare. However there's no need to have these BUG_ON()'s, we can just return any error to the caller and all callers and their upper call chain are already dealing with errors. So just make add_new_free_space() return any errors, while removing the BUG_ON()'s, and returning the total amount of added free space to an optional u64 pointer argument.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 2.6.29 — fixed in 6.5

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/23e72231f8281505883514b23709076e234d4f27
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d8ccbd21918fd7fa6ce3226cffc22c444228e8ad
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f775ceb0cb530e4a469b718fb2a24843071087f5

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