Linux Pulls In Two Serious Bug Fixes For Bcachefs

Overnight the latest fixes to the Linux 6.8 kernel were merged including two that are "serious" and will be back-ported to the existing stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well.

Bcachefs maintainer Kent Overstreet summed up the latest file-system fixes as:

"Two serious ones here that we'll want to backport to stable: a fix for a race in the thread_with_file code, and another locking fixup in the subvolume deletion path."

To now Bcachefs would lock the parent directory before validating the dentry and not be unlocked if it cannot perform the requested deletion. This would lead to a situation where if running "bcachefs subvolume delete not-exist-entry" twice would first lead to an error while on the second attempt would become stuck because the parent dir is locked.

The other noted serious fix is to install the FD later to avoid a race condition with close as it could lead to premature destruction of the kernel thread. Both of these bugs date back to the original Bcachefs submission to the mainline Linux kernel in the v6.7 cycle.

Plus there are a few other fixes too part of this latest fixes pull that is now in Linux 6.8 Git ahead of next weekend's Linux 6.8-rc4 and at least the serious fixes are expected to be back-ported to the stable series in the days ahead.