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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2026-43338 json

btrfs: reserve enough transaction items for qgroup ioctls

published 2026-05-08 6 mo ago modified 2026-11-06 2 d ago also EUVD-2026-28622

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 1%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

btrfs: reserve enough transaction items for qgroup ioctls

Currently our qgroup ioctls don't reserve any space, they just do a transaction join, which does not reserve any space, neither for the quota tree updates nor for the delayed refs generated when updating the quota tree. The quota root uses the global block reserve, which is fine most of the time since we don't expect a lot of updates to the quota root, or to be too close to -ENOSPC such that other critical metadata updates need to resort to the global reserve.

However this is not optimal, as not reserving proper space may result in a transaction abort due to not reserving space for delayed refs and then abusing the use of the global block reserve.

For example, the following reproducer (which is unlikely to model any real world use case, but just to illustrate the problem), triggers such a transaction abort due to -ENOSPC when running delayed refs:

$ cat test.sh #!/bin/bash

DEV=/dev/nullb0 MNT=/mnt/nullb0

umount $DEV &> /dev/null # Limit device to 1G so that it's much faster to reproduce the issue. mkfs.btrfs -f -b 1G $DEV mount -o commit=600 $DEV $MNT

fallocate -l 800M $MNT/filler btrfs quota enable $MNT

for ((i = 1; i <= 400000; i++)); do btrfs qgroup create 1/$i $MNT done

umount $MNT

When running this, we can see in dmesg/syslog that a transaction abort happened:

[436.490] BTRFS error (device nullb0): failed to run delayed ref for logical 30408704 num_bytes 16384 type 176 action 1 ref_mod 1: -28 [436.493] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [436.494] BTRFS: Transaction aborted (error -28) [436.495] WARNING: fs/btrfs/extent-tree.c:2247 at btrfs_run_delayed_refs+0xd9/0x110 [btrfs], CPU#4: umount/2495372 [436.497] Modules linked in: btrfs loop (...) [436.508] CPU: 4 UID: 0 PID: 2495372 Comm: umount Tainted: G W 6.19.0-rc8-btrfs-next-225+ #1 PREEMPT(full) [436.510] Tainted: [W]=WARN [436.511] Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS rel-1.16.2-0-gea1b7a073390-prebuilt.qemu.org 04/01/2014 [436.513] RIP: 0010:btrfs_run_delayed_refs+0xdf/0x110 [btrfs] [436.514] Code: 0f 82 ea (...) [436.518] RSP: 0018:ffffd511850b7d78 EFLAGS: 00010292 [436.519] RAX: 00000000ffffffe4 RBX: ffff8f120dad37e0 RCX: 0000000002040001 [436.520] RDX: 0000000000000002 RSI: 00000000ffffffe4 RDI: ffffffffc090fd80 [436.522] RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: 0000000000000001 R09: ffffffffc04d1867 [436.523] R10: ffff8f18dc1fffa8 R11: 0000000000000003 R12: ffff8f173aa89400 [436.524] R13: 0000000000000000 R14: ffff8f173aa89400 R15: 0000000000000000 [436.526] FS: 00007fe59045d840(0000) GS:ffff8f192e22e000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 [436.527] CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033 [436.528] CR2: 00007fe5905ff2b0 CR3: 000000060710a002 CR4: 0000000000370ef0 [436.530] Call Trace: [436.530] <TASK> [436.530] btrfs_commit_transaction+0x73/0xc00 [btrfs] [436.531] ? btrfs_attach_transaction_barrier+0x1e/0x70 [btrfs] [436.532] sync_filesystem+0x7a/0x90 [436.533] generic_shutdown_super+0x28/0x180 [436.533] kill_anon_super+0x12/0x40 [436.534] btrfs_kill_super+0x12/0x20 [btrfs] [436.534] deactivate_locked_super+0x2f/0xb0 [436.534] cleanup_mnt+0xea/0x180 [436.535] task_work_run+0x58/0xa0 [436.535] exit_to_user_mode_loop+0xed/0x480 [436.536] ? __x64_sys_umount+0x68/0x80 [436.536] do_syscall_64+0x2a5/0xf20 [436.537] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e [436.537] RIP: 0033:0x7fe5906b6217 [436.538] Code: 0d 00 f7 (...) [436.540] RSP: 002b:00007ffcd87a61f8 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 00000000000000a6 [436.541] RAX: 0000000000000000 RBX: 00005618b9ecadc8 RCX: 00007fe5906b6217 [436.541] RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000000 RDI: 00005618b9ecb100 [436.542] RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: 00007ffcd87a4fe0 R09: 00000000ffffffff [436.544] R10: 0000000000000103 R11: ---truncated---

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.191, 6.6.160, 6.12.81, 6.18.22, 6.19.12, 7.0
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.85-1
  • linux Debian 14 6.19.12-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-43338

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-136.136
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1061.64
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1064.72
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1059.67
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1061.62
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1063.71
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1046.50
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1061.65

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-43338

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-rt Linux Micro 6.1, Linux Micro 6.0 6.4.0-48.1
  • kernel-source-rt Linux Micro 6.1, Linux Micro 6.0 6.4.0-48.1
  • kernel-rt Real Time Module 15 SP7 6.4.0-150700.7.59.2
  • kernel-syms-rt Real Time Module 15 SP7 6.4.0-150700.7.59.1
  • kernel-source-rt Real Time Module 15 SP7 6.4.0-150700.7.59.2
  • kernel-64kb SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP7 6.4.0-150700.53.60.1
  • kernel-syms SLE Module for Development Tools 15 SP7 6.4.0-150700.53.60.1
  • kernel-azure SLE Module for Public Cloud 15 SP7 6.4.0-150700.53.60.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2026:22433-1SUSE-SU-2026:22458-1SUSE-SU-2026:2591-1SUSE-SU-2026:2482-1SUSE-SU-2026:2450-1SUSE-SU-2026:22108-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-43338 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: btrfs: reserve enough transaction items for qgroup ioctls

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.11% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 1% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.