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Advisory severityMedium5.5Red Hat Linux

Medium [CVE-2026-72159] reject non-inline dinodes with i_size and zero i_clusters

This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-72159.

Aggregated and source-linked by VulniPulse. Data sources, validation and limitations.

CVE-2026-72159 Source published Source updated

VulniPulse record published Record updated

Affected products & platforms
Red Hat LinuxUnclassified
Open source advisory

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Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ocfs2: reject non-inline dinodes with i_size and zero i_clusters On a volume mounted without OCFS2_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_SPARSE_ALLOC, a non-inline regular file with non-zero i_size and zero i_clusters is structurally malformed: the extent map declares no allocated clusters yet the size header claims content exists.

Keep rejecting that shape, but express it through a shared predicate so the same invariant is available to normal inode reads and online filecheck.

The same zero-cluster shape is also malformed for non-inline directories. ocfs2 directory growth allocates backing storage before advancing i_size, and ocfs2_dir_foreach_blk_el() later walks until ctx->pos reaches i_size_read(inode).

A forged directory dinode with a huge i_size and no clusters would repeatedly fail on holes while advancing through the claimed size. Sparse regular files remain exempt: on sparse-alloc volumes, truncate can legitimately grow i_size without allocating clusters.

System inodes and inline-data dinodes also retain their separate storage rules. Mirror the check in ocfs2_filecheck_validate_inode_block() as well. filecheck reports through its own error namespace, so malformed size/cluster state is logged as a filecheck invalid-inode result rather than via ocfs2_error(), but it must not proceed into ocfs2_populate_inode().

Affected versions

No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.

Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 24 days ago·verify at source

Fixed versions

No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.

Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 24 days ago·verify at source

Mitigation

The source record does not include mitigation steps. That is not a statement that no fix exists — read the vendor advisory below for the authoritative guidance.

Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 24 days ago·verify at source

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