CVE-2026-46066
MediumCVSS 5.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk6th percentile - higher than 6% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability has been identified in the Linux kernel related to incorrect counting of operations when buffer allocation fails for encrypted files in CephFS. When buffer allocation fails, the operation count is incremented, leading to a kernel panic.
Risk Assessment
Organizations using CephFS may experience kernel crashes, resulting in system unavailability and potential data issues. High memory pressure may increase the risk of this vulnerability occurring.
Recommendation
It is recommended to update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix to prevent kernel panic in case of buffer allocation failure. Monitoring memory load may also help minimize risk.
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ceph: fix num_ops off-by-one when crypto allocation fails move_dirty_folio_in_page_array() may fail if the file is encrypted, the dirty folio is not the first in the batch, and it fails to allocate a bounce buffer to hold the ciphertext. When that happens, ceph_process_folio_batch() simply redirties the folio and flushes the current batch -- it can retry that folio in a future batch. However, if this failed folio is not contiguous with the last folio that did make it into the batch, then ceph_process_folio_batch() has already incremented `ceph_wbc->num_ops`; because it doesn't follow through and add the discontiguous folio to the array, ceph_submit_write() -- which expects that `ceph_wbc->num_ops` accurately reflects the number of contiguous ranges (and therefore the required number of "write extent" ops) in the writeback -- will panic the kernel: BUG_ON(ceph_wbc->op_idx + 1 != req->r_num_ops); This issue can be reproduced on affected kernels by writing to fscrypt-enabled CephFS file(s) with a 4KiB-written/4KiB-skipped/repeat pattern (total filesize should not matter) and gradually increasing the system's memory pressure until a bounce buffer allocation fails. Fix this crash by decrementing `ceph_wbc->num_ops` back to the correct value when move_dirty_folio_in_page_array() fails, but the folio already started counting a new (i.e. still-empty) extent. The defect corrected by this patch has existed since 2022 (see first `Fixes:`), but another bug blocked multi-folio encrypted writeback until recently (see second `Fixes:`). The second commit made it into 6.18.16, 6.19.6, and 7.0-rc1, unmasking the panic in those versions. This patch therefore fixes a regression (panic) introduced by cac190c7674f.