CVE-2026-46160 — btrfs: fix missing last_unlink_trans update when removing a directory

Affected: Linux

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

btrfs: fix missing last_unlink_trans update when removing a directory

When removing a directory we are not updating its last_unlink_trans field, which can result in incorrect fsync behaviour in case some one fsyncs the directory after it was removed because it's holding a file descriptor on it.

Example scenario:

mkdir /mnt/dir1 mkdir /mnt/dir1/dir2 mkdir /mnt/dir3

sync -f /mnt

# Do some change to the directory and fsync it. chmod 700 /mnt/dir1 xfs_io -c fsync /mnt/dir1

# Move dir2 out of dir1 so that dir1 becomes empty. mv /mnt/dir1/dir2 /mnt/dir3/

open fd on /mnt/dir1 call rmdir(2) on path "/mnt/dir1" fsync fd

When attempting to mount the filesystem, the log replay will fail with an -EIO error and dmesg/syslog has the following:

[445771.626482] BTRFS info (device dm-0): first mount of filesystem 0368bbea-6c5e-44b5-b409-09abe496e650 [445771.626486] BTRFS info (device dm-0): using crc32c checksum algorithm [445771.627912] BTRFS info (device dm-0): start tree-log replay [445771.628335] page: refcount:2 mapcount:0 mapping:0000000061443ddc index:0x1d00 pfn:0x7072a5 [445771.629453] memcg:ffff89f400351b00 [445771.629892] aops:btree_aops [btrfs] ino:1 [445771.630737] flags: 0x17fffc00000402a(uptodate|lru|private|writeback|node=0|zone=2|lastcpupid=0x1ffff) [445771.632359] raw: 017fffc00000402a fffff47284d950c8 fffff4729…

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CVE-2026-46160 — btrfs: fix missing last_unlink_trans update when removing a directory