CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-39884

MediumCVSS 4.7
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.11%

1th percentile - higher than 1% of all known CVEs

Summary

A race condition between inode eviction and caching in the Linux kernel's btrfs filesystem can leave a live inode missing from the root's xarray. This causes subvolume deletion to hang in an infinite loop, resulting in soft lockups. The fix ensures the xarray entry is only deleted if it still matches the inode.

Risk Assessment

Organizations using btrfs may experience system hangs during subvolume deletion operations, leading to service unavailability and requiring a reboot.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix for CVE-2025-39884. If immediate patching is not possible, avoid heavy subvolume deletion operations on btrfs systems until the patch is applied.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: fix subvolume deletion lockup caused by inodes xarray race There is a race condition between inode eviction and inode caching that can cause a live struct btrfs_inode to be missing from the root->inodes xarray. Specifically, there is a window during evict() between the inode being unhashed and deleted from the xarray. If btrfs_iget() is called for the same inode in that window, it will be recreated and inserted into the xarray, but then eviction will delete the new entry, leaving nothing in the xarray: Thread 1 Thread 2 --------------------------------------------------------------- evict() remove_inode_hash() btrfs_iget_path() btrfs_iget_locked() btrfs_read_locked_inode() btrfs_add_inode_to_root() destroy_inode() btrfs_destroy_inode() btrfs_del_inode_from_root() __xa_erase In turn, this can cause issues for subvolume deletion. Specifically, if an inode is in this lost state, and all other inodes are evicted, then btrfs_del_inode_from_root() will call btrfs_add_dead_root() prematurely. If the lost inode has a delayed_node attached to it, then when btrfs_clean_one_deleted_snapshot() calls btrfs_kill_all_delayed_nodes(), it will loop forever because the delayed_nodes xarray will never become empty (unless memory pressure forces the inode out). We saw this manifest as soft lockups in production. Fix it by only deleting the xarray entry if it matches the given inode (using __xa_cmpxchg()).

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS