U.S. flag   An official website of the United States government
Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (Dot gov) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Vulnerability Change Records for CVE-2023-54158

Change History

New CVE Received from kernel.org 12/24/2025 8:16:17 AM

Action Type Old Value New Value
Added Description

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

btrfs: don't free qgroup space unless specified

Boris noticed in his simple quotas testing that he was getting a leak
with Sweet Tea's change to subvol create that stopped doing a
transaction commit.  This was just a side effect of that change.

In the delayed inode code we have an optimization that will free extra
reservations if we think we can pack a dir item into an already modified
leaf.  Previously this wouldn't be triggered in the subvolume create
case because we'd commit the transaction, it was still possible but
much harder to trigger.  It could actually be triggered if we did a
mkdir && subvol create with qgroups enabled.

This occurs because in btrfs_insert_delayed_dir_index(), which gets
called when we're adding the dir item, we do the following:

  btrfs_block_rsv_release(fs_info, trans->block_rsv, bytes, NULL);

if we're able to skip reserving space.

The problem here is that trans->block_rsv points at the temporary block
rsv for the subvolume create, which has qgroup reservations in the block
rsv.

This is a problem because btrfs_block_rsv_release() will do the
following:

  if (block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_reserved >= block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_size) {
	  qgroup_to_release = block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_reserved -
		  block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_size;
	  block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_reserved = block_rsv->qgroup_rsv_size;
  }

The temporary block rsv just has ->qgroup_rsv_reserved set,
->qgroup_rsv_size == 0.  The optimization in
btrfs_insert_delayed_dir_index() sets ->qgroup_rsv_reserved = 0.  Then
later on when we call btrfs_subvolume_release_metadata() which has

  btrfs_block_rsv_release(fs_info, rsv, (u64)-1, &qgroup_to_release);
  btrfs_qgroup_convert_reserved_meta(root, qgroup_to_release);

qgroup_to_release is set to 0, and we do not convert the reserved
metadata space.

The problem here is that the block rsv code has been unconditionally
messing with ->qgroup_rsv_reserved, because the main place this is used
is delalloc, and any time we call btrfs_block_rsv_release() we do it
with qgroup_to_release set, and thus do the proper accounting.

The subvolume code is the only other code that uses the qgroup
reservation stuff, but it's intermingled with the above optimization,
and thus was getting its reservation freed out from underneath it and
thus leaking the reserved space.

The solution is to simply not mess with the qgroup reservations if we
don't have qgroup_to_release set.  This works with the existing code as
anything that messes with the delalloc reservations always have
qgroup_to_release set.  This fixes the leak that Boris was observing.
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/04ff6bd0317735791ef3e443c7c89f3c0dda548d
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/148b16cd30b202999ec5b534e3e5d8ab4b766f21
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/15e877e5923ec6d6caa5e447dcc4b79a8ff7cc53
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1e05bf5e80bb1161b7294c9ce5292b26232ab853
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/478bd15f46b6e3aae78aac4f3788697f1546eea6
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d246331b78cbef86237f9c22389205bc9b4e1cc1
Added Reference

								
							
							
						
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f264be24146bee2d652010a18ae2517df5856261