CVE-2023-54158

btrfs: don't free qgroup space unless specified

published December 24, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
14.8
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

btrfs: don't free qgroup space unless specified

Boris noticed in his simple quotas testing that he was getting a leak

with Sweet Tea's change to subvol create that stopped doing a

transaction commit. This was just a side effect of that change.

In the delayed inode code we have an optimization that will free extra

reservations if we think we can pack a dir item into an already modified

leaf. Previously this wouldn't be triggered in the subvolume create

case because we'd commit the transaction, it was still possible but

much harder to trigger. It could actually be triggered if we did a

mkdir && subvol create with qgroups enabled.

This occurs because in btrfs_insert_delayed_dir_index(), which gets

called when we're adding the dir item, we do the following:

btrfs_block_rsv_release(fs_info, trans->block_rsv, bytes, NULL);

if we're able to skip reserving space.

The problem here is that trans->block_rsv points at the temporary block

rsv for the subvolume create, which has qgroup reservations in the block

rsv.

This is a problem because btrfs_block_rsv_release() will do the

following:

if (block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_reserved >= block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_size) {

qgroup_to_release = block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_reserved -

block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_size;

block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_reserved = block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_size;

}

The temporary block rsv just has ->qgroup_rsv_reserved set,

->qgroup_rsv_size == 0. The optimization in

btrfs_insert_delayed_dir_index() sets ->qgroup_rsv_reserved = 0. Then

later on when we call btrfs_subvolume_release_metadata() which has

btrfs_block_rsv_release(fs_info, rsv, (u64)-1, &qgroup_to_release);

btrfs_qgroup_convert_reserved_meta(root, qgroup_to_release);

qgroup_to_release is set to 0, and we do not convert the reserved

metadata space.

The problem here is that the block rsv code has been unconditionally

messing with ->qgroup_rsv_reserved, because the main place this is used

is delalloc, and any time we call btrfs_block_rsv_release() we do it

with qgroup_to_release set, and thus do the proper accounting.

The subvolume code is the only other code that uses the qgroup

reservation stuff, but it's intermingled with the above optimization,

and thus was getting its reservation freed out from underneath it and

thus leaking the reserved space.

The solution is to simply not mess with the qgroup reservations if we

don't have qgroup_to_release set. This works with the existing code as

anything that messes with the delalloc reservations always have

qgroup_to_release set. This fixes the leak that Boris was observing.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00244 · 14.8th percentile
Published
2025-12-24T13:07Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 24 DEC 13:07Z
    btrfs: don't free qgroup space unless specified
    cvelistv5