CVE-2026-31519

Technical Description

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

btrfs: set BTRFS_ROOT_ORPHAN_CLEANUP during subvol create

We have recently observed a number of subvolumes with broken dentries.

ls-ing the parent dir looks like:

drwxrwxrwt 1 root root 16 Jan 23 16:49 .

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 24 Jan 23 16:48 ..

d????????? ? ? ? ? ? broken_subvol

and similarly stat-ing the file fails.

In this state, deleting the subvol fails with ENOENT, but attempting to

create a new file or subvol over it errors out with EEXIST and even

aborts the fs. Which leaves us a bit stuck.

dmesg contains a single notable error message reading:

"could not do orphan cleanup -2"

2 is ENOENT and the error comes from the failure handling path of

btrfs_orphan_cleanup(), with the stack leading back up to

btrfs_lookup().

btrfs_lookup

btrfs_lookup_dentry

btrfs_orphan_cleanup // prints that message and returns -ENOENT

After some detailed inspection of the internal state, it became clear

that:

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