CVE-2025-38220

medium

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: only dirty folios when data journaling regular files fstest generic/388 occasionally reproduces a crash that looks as follows: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000 ... Call Trace: <TASK> ext4_block_zero_page_range+0x30c/0x380 [ext4] ext4_truncate+0x436/0x440 [ext4] ext4_process_orphan+0x5d/0x110 [ext4] ext4_orphan_cleanup+0x124/0x4f0 [ext4] ext4_fill_super+0x262d/0x3110 [ext4] get_tree_bdev_flags+0x132/0x1d0 vfs_get_tree+0x26/0xd0 vfs_cmd_create+0x59/0xe0 __do_sys_fsconfig+0x4ed/0x6b0 do_syscall_64+0x82/0x170 ... This occurs when processing a symlink inode from the orphan list. The partial block zeroing code in the truncate path calls ext4_dirty_journalled_data() -> folio_mark_dirty(). The latter calls mapping->a_ops->dirty_folio(), but symlink inodes are not assigned an a_ops vector in ext4, hence the crash. To avoid this problem, update the ext4_dirty_journalled_data() helper to only mark the folio dirty on regular files (for which a_ops is assigned). This also matches the journaling logic in the ext4_symlink() creation path, where ext4_handle_dirty_metadata() is called directly.

References

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e26268ff1dcae5662c1b96c35f18cfa6ab73d9de

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d7af6eee8cd60f55aa8c5fe2b91f11ec0c9a0f27

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cf6a4c4ac7b6e3214f25df594c9689a62f1bb456

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/be5f3061a6f904e3674257879e71881ceee5b673

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2025-07-04

Updated: 2025-07-08

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 4.9

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 5.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Severity: Medium

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00018