CVE-2026-97416
Received
Received - Intake
Null pointer dereference in Linux kernel Btrfs balance operation
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-97416, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-09-24
Last updated on: 2026-10-03
Assigner: kernel.org
Description
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
btrfs: balance: fix potential bg lookup failure in btrfs_may_alloc_data_chunk()
[BUG]
Running btrfs balance can trigger a null-ptr-deref before relocating a
data chunk when metadata corruption leaves a chunk in the chunk tree
without a corresponding block group in the in-memory cache:
KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x0000000000000088-0x000000000000008f]
RIP: 0010:btrfs_may_alloc_data_chunk+0x40/0x1c0 fs/btrfs/volumes.c:3601
Call Trace:
__btrfs_balance fs/btrfs/volumes.c:4217 [inline]
btrfs_balance+0x2516/0x42b0 fs/btrfs/volumes.c:4604
btrfs_ioctl_balance fs/btrfs/ioctl.c:3577 [inline]
btrfs_ioctl+0x25cf/0x5b90 fs/btrfs/ioctl.c:5313
...
[CAUSE]
__btrfs_balance() iterates the on-disk chunk tree and passes the chunk
logical bytenr to btrfs_may_alloc_data_chunk() before relocating a data
chunk. That helper then queries the in-memory block group cache:
cache = btrfs_lookup_block_group(fs_info, chunk_offset);
chunk_type = cache->flags; /* cache may be NULL */
A corrupt image can contain a chunk item whose matching block group
item is missing, so no block group is ever inserted into the cache. In
that case btrfs_lookup_block_group() returns NULL.
The code only guards this with ASSERT(cache), which becomes a no-op when
CONFIG_BTRFS_ASSERT is disabled. The subsequent dereference of
cache->flags therefore crashes the kernel.
[FIX]
Add a NULL check after btrfs_lookup_block_group() in
btrfs_may_alloc_data_chunk() and print and error message for clarity.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| linux | kernel | * |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-UNKNOWN |
