CVE-2021-46987

Technical Description

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

btrfs: fix deadlock when cloning inline extents and using qgroups

There are a few exceptional cases where cloning an inline extent needs to

copy the inline extent data into a page of the destination inode.

When this happens, we end up starting a transaction while having a dirty

page for the destination inode and while having the range locked in the

destination's inode iotree too. Because when reserving metadata space

for a transaction we may need to flush existing delalloc in case there is

not enough free space, we have a mechanism in place to prevent a deadlock,

which was introduced in commit 3d45f221ce627d ("btrfs: fix deadlock when

cloning inline extent and low on free metadata space").

However when using qgroups, a transaction also reserves metadata qgroup

space, which can also result in flushing delalloc in case there is not

enough available space at the moment. When this happens we deadlock, since

flushing de

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References