Affected: Linux

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_sh…