CVE-2026-72189 — ntfs: fail attrlist updates when the superblock is inactive

Affected: Linux

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

ntfs: fail attrlist updates when the superblock is inactive

generic_shutdown_super() clears SB_ACTIVE before evicting cached inodes. If eviction selects the fake inode for a base inode's unnamed $ATTRIBUTE_LIST attribute, ntfs_evict_big_inode() drops the fake inode's reference on the base inode while the fake inode is still hashed and marked I_FREEING.

That iput can synchronously write back the base inode. The writeback path may update mapping pairs and call ntfs_attrlist_update(), which unconditionally calls ntfs_attr_iget() for the same $ATTRIBUTE_LIST fake inode. VFS then finds the I_FREEING inode and waits for eviction to finish, but the current task is still inside that eviction path, causing a self-deadlock in find_inode().

Fix this by mirroring the teardown guard used by __ntfs_write_inode(): once SB_ACTIVE has been cleared, do not try to iget the attribute-list fake inode. Return -EIO so teardown aborts the update instead of waiting on the inode it is evicting.

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CVE-2026-72189 — ntfs: fail attrlist updates when the superblock is inactive