CVE-2023-54158 btrfs: don't free qgroup space unless specified

What is CVE-2023-54158?

CVE-2023-54158 is a denial of service vulnerability in Linux, published on 24 Dec 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official 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.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-54158?

How do I fix CVE-2023-54158?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2023-54158 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-54158 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-54158, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-54158, GHSA-crmq-c99h-f986, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-54158.