CVE-2026-45892 — ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout

Affected: Linux

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

ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout

When splitting an unwritten extent in the middle and converting it to initialized in ext4_split_extent() with the EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT and EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flags set, it could leave a stale unwritten extent.

Assume we have an unwritten file and buffered write in the middle of it without dioread_nolock enabled, it will allocate blocks as written extent.

0 A B N [UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent U: unwritten extent [UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDD--] D: valid data |<- ->| ----> this range needs to be initialized

ext4_split_extent() first try to split this extent at B with EXT4_EXT_DATA_PARTIAL_VALID1 and EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT flag set, but ext4_split_extent_at() failed to split this extent due to temporary lack of space. It zeroout B to N and leave the entire extent as unwritten.

0 A B N [UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent [UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDDZZ] Z: zeroed data

ext4_split_extent() then try to split this extent at A with EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flag set. This time, it split successfully and leave an written extent from A to N.

0 A B N [UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent [UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDDZZ]

Finally ext4_map_create_…

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CVE-2026-45892 — ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout