published September 12, 2026
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.