CVE-2026-80899: erofs: remove fscache backend entirely

CVE-2026-80899: erofs: remove fscache backend entirely

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@kernel.org>

Description
===========

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

erofs: remove fscache backend entirely

EROFS over fscache was introduced to provide image lazy pulling
functionality. After the feature landed, the fscache subsystem made
netfs a new hard dependency, which is unexpected for a local filesystem
and has an kernel-defined caching hierarchy which could be inflexible
compared to the fanotify pre-content hooks. Therefore, this feature has
been deprecated for almost two years.

As EROFS file-backed mounts and fanotify pre-content hooks both upstream
for a while and already providing equivalent functionality (erofs-utils
has supported fanotify pre-content hooks), let's remove the fscache
backend now.

The main application of this feature is Nydus [1], and they plan to move
to use fanotify pre-content hooks in the near future too.

I hope this patch can be merged into Linux 7.2, which is also motivated
by newly found implementation issues [2][3] that are not worth
investigating given the deprecation and limited development resources.
The associated fscache/cachefiles cleanup patch will follow separately
through the vfs tree (netfs) later: it seems fine since the codebase is
isolated by CONFIG_CACHEFILES_ONDEMAND.

[1] https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus/blob/v2.1.0/docs/nydus-fscache.md
[2] https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus/pull/1824
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260619135800.1594811-1-michael.bommarito@gmail.com

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2026-80899 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Fixed in 7.1.8 with commit f6145794f17a27d25f8a84edb80731fb0e07c196
	Fixed in 7.2 with commit c37460cd9b2fcb61ec66b7eb4fde737e65ec2a56

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2026-80899
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	Documentation/filesystems/erofs.rst
	fs/erofs/Kconfig
	fs/erofs/Makefile
	fs/erofs/data.c
	fs/erofs/fscache.c
	fs/erofs/inode.c
	fs/erofs/internal.h
	fs/erofs/ishare.c
	fs/erofs/super.c
	fs/erofs/zdata.c


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f6145794f17a27d25f8a84edb80731fb0e07c196
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c37460cd9b2fcb61ec66b7eb4fde737e65ec2a56