published September 17, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: drain in-flight DIO before buffered write fallback
generic/746 started failing intermittently on ext3 (no-extent inodes).
The test triggers 'Page cache invalidation failure on direct I/O'
warnings and subsequent fsync returns -EIO. Adding a 50ms delay
between ext4_buffered_write_iter() and filemap_write_and_wait_range()
in ext4_dio_write_iter() makes the race almost always reproducible.
On no-extent inodes, DIO writes to holes cannot use unwritten extents,
so ext4_iomap_alloc() leaves m_flags=0 and ext4_map_blocks() returns 0.
The iomap layer then returns -ENOTBLK, causing fallback to buffered I/O.
The fallback path in ext4_dio_write_iter() calls
ext4_buffered_write_iter() which dirties pages, then does flush and
invalidate. However, there's an unprotected window between
ext4_buffered_write_iter() returning (with inode lock released) and
the subsequent flush+invalidate.
Concurrent async DIO completions from other threads can run
kiocb_invalidate_post_direct_write() during this window. If pages have
been re-dirtied, post-invalidation finds dirty pages and triggers the
warning, setting -EIO in the error sequence.
Consider a file with two 4k extents: [hole][written]. Thread A does
DIO to the written extent, while thread B does DIO spanning both:
kworker A (4k DIO, allocated block) kworker B (8k DIO, fallback)
----------------------------------- ----------------------------
inode_lock_shared() inode_lock_shared()
iomap_dio_rw(): iomap_dio_rw():
kiocb_invalidate_pages -> clean iomap_begin -> -ENOTBLK
submit_bio (async) dio->size = 0
inode_unlock_shared() inode_unlock_shared()
[bio pending in block layer] /* fallback: lock released */
ext4_buffered_write_iter()
inode_lock(exclusive)
generic_perform_write()
-> dirty pages [0, 8k]
inode_unlock(exclusive)
/* pages dirty, no lock */
[bio completes] filemap_write_and_wait_range()
iomap_dio_complete() -> flush dirty pages
kiocb_invalidate_post_direct_write() invalidate_mapping_pages()
invalidate_inode_pages2_range()
-> finds dirty page!
-> dio_warn_stale_pagecache()
-> errseq_set(-EIO)
This issue can be triggered through normal I/O paths, not just
intentionally overlapping DIO writes from userspace. For example,
generic/746 uses a loop device where multiple kworkers issue concurrent
I/O to the backing file. Additionally, when block_size < folio_size,
non-overlapping DIO writes that share a large folio can also trigger
the race.
Add inode_dio_wait() in ext4_buffered_write_iter() before
ext4_write_checks() to drain all in-flight DIO. This ensures that
all DIO clears existing pages before submitting IO (via
kiocb_invalidate_pages()), all BIO waits for all DIO to complete
(via inode_dio_wait()), and ext4_write_checks() observes the inode
size after all completed DIO so that ext4_block_zero_eof() does not
race with in-flight DIO, thus eliminating the race.