CVE-2026-98684 PUBLISHED

smb: client: flush and commit data before querying allocated ranges

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 18.10.2026 Updated: 18.10.2026

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

smb: client: flush and commit data before querying allocated ranges

The mode 0 / FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE fallocate emulation for small interior ranges in smb3_simple_fallocate_range() issues FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES and zero-fills any sub-range the server reports as an unallocated hole, to force block allocation without changing file contents.

This is unsafe against Windows servers. Per the Win32 documentation, FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES only reports ranges that may contain nonzero data and is explicitly not coherent with recently written data:

"a call to FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES [after writing to a network file] would not necessarily return a correct list of allocated regions. To ensure coherency [...] flush the data to the file"

fsx (generic/363) reproduces the resulting corruption against Windows Server 2022: a range is written, an uncached read returns the data, yet the next FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES on that range reports it as a whole hole, so the emulation overwrites live data with zeroes. A network trace confirmed the WRITE, the READ returning data and the query returning an empty range list within microseconds. Samba does not exhibit this; its query is coherent with the written data.

Write back the dirty pages, drain any outstanding I/O and issue an SMB2 FLUSH to force the server to commit the data before querying the allocated ranges, so the query reflects the data actually present.

With this, generic/363 passes against both Windows Server 2022 and Samba over 100000 fsx operations.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 966a3cb7c7db786452a87afdc3b48858fc4d4d6b to f82242fe3109a3ef72f429540b5bdde08fbfb0e4 (excl.)
  • affected from 966a3cb7c7db786452a87afdc3b48858fc4d4d6b to bf84e44ff0ed802778eafd7ecb623635379cb506 (excl.)
  • affected from 966a3cb7c7db786452a87afdc3b48858fc4d4d6b to aa994489bd835547c191827acc460192e147032d (excl.)
  • Version c406bb9ece6ef63721daab106f132ff4b4234e81 is affected
  • Version 2f9f4a2d0e6fcf0673ed51195e06e47abe966900 is affected
  • Version 5e397c943424de94879830e72c95f2679e297a76 is affected
  • affected from 5.10.50 to 5.11 (excl.)
  • affected from 5.12.17 to 5.13 (excl.)
  • affected from 5.13.2 to 5.14 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.14 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.14 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.56 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.10 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc6 to * (incl.)

References