CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-38276 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fs/dax: Fix "don't skip locked entries when scanning entries" Commit 6be3e21d25ca ("fs/dax: don't skip locked entries when scanning entries") introduced a new function, wait_entry_unlocked_exclusive(), which waits for the current entry to become unlocked without advancing the XArray iterator state. Waiting for the entry to become unlocked requires dropping the XArray lock. This requires calling xas_pause() prior to dropping the lock which leaves the xas in a suitable state for the next iteration. However this has the side-effect of advancing the xas state to the next index. Normally this isn't an issue because xas_for_each() contains code to detect this state and thus avoid advancing the index a second time on the next loop iteration. However both callers of and wait_entry_unlocked_exclusive() itself subsequently use the xas state to reload the entry. As xas_pause() updated the state to the next index this will cause the current entry which is being waited on to be skipped. This caused the following warning to fire intermittently when running xftest generic/068 on an XFS filesystem with FS DAX enabled: [ 35.067397…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-07-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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