published September 4, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
erofs: remove fscache backend entirely
EROFS over fscache was introduced to provide image lazy pulling
functionality. After the feature landed, the fscache subsystem made
netfs a new hard dependency, which is unexpected for a local filesystem
and has an kernel-defined caching hierarchy which could be inflexible
compared to the fanotify pre-content hooks. Therefore, this feature has
been deprecated for almost two years.
As EROFS file-backed mounts and fanotify pre-content hooks both upstream
for a while and already providing equivalent functionality (erofs-utils
has supported fanotify pre-content hooks), let's remove the fscache
backend now.
The main application of this feature is Nydus [1], and they plan to move
to use fanotify pre-content hooks in the near future too.
I hope this patch can be merged into Linux 7.2, which is also motivated
by newly found implementation issues [2][3] that are not worth
investigating given the deprecation and limited development resources.
The associated fscache/cachefiles cleanup patch will follow separately
through the vfs tree (netfs) later: it seems fine since the codebase is
isolated by CONFIG_CACHEFILES_ONDEMAND.
[1] https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus/blob/v2.1.0/docs/nydus-fscache.md
[2] https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus/pull/1824
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]