CVE-2023-53337

nilfs2: do not write dirty data after degenerating to read-only

Medium · published September 17, 2025

CVSS v3.1
5.5
EPSS
0%
Percentile
10.3
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

nilfs2: do not write dirty data after degenerating to read-only

According to syzbot's report, mark_buffer_dirty() called from

nilfs_segctor_do_construct() outputs a warning with some patterns after

nilfs2 detects metadata corruption and degrades to read-only mode.

After such read-only degeneration, page cache data may be cleared through

nilfs_clear_dirty_page() which may also clear the uptodate flag for their

buffer heads. However, even after the degeneration, log writes are still

performed by unmount processing etc., which causes mark_buffer_dirty() to

be called for buffer heads without the "uptodate" flag and causes the

warning.

Since any writes should not be done to a read-only file system in the

first place, this fixes the warning in mark_buffer_dirty() by letting

nilfs_segctor_do_construct() abort early if in read-only mode.

This also changes the retry check of nilfs_segctor_write_out() to avoid

unnecessary log write retries if it detects -EROFS that

nilfs_segctor_do_construct() returned.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.5 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00207 · 10.3th percentile
Published
2025-09-17T14:56Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 17 SEP 14:56Z
    nilfs2: do not write dirty data after degenerating to read-only
    cvelistv5