CVE-2026-89645: btrfs: drop recovered reloc root refs on recovery failure

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: 2026-09-11 · updated 2026-10-30

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: drop recovered reloc root refs on recovery failure During relocation recovery, each fs root gets a reference to its relocation root. If loading or adding a later root fails, or if the first transaction commit fails, btrfs_recover_relocation() jumps to out_unset before merge_reloc_roots() and clean_dirty_subvols(). put_reloc_control() drops the list-owned relocation root references, but it does not clear fs_root->reloc_root or drop the references owned by those pointers. Mount cleanup only drops them when BTRFS_FS_ERROR is set, so an error such as -ENOMEM while processing a later root can leave references behind. Keep temporary references to the fs roots associated during recovery. On failure, clear their reloc_root pointers and drop the corresponding references. Once the first transaction commit succeeds, drop only the temporary fs root references and let the normal merge and cleanup paths handle the relocation roots. Fault injection on a pending-relocation image confirmed the cleanup gap. With an injected first-commit failure, 25 fs roots had reloc_root set with fs_error=0. With this fix, the same failure path drops that count to 0 before mount fails.

Affected products

Linux: 5.7 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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