CVE-2026-98067: erofs: disable LZ4 rolling decompression for now

Published Sep 25, 2026
·
Updated

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

erofs: disable LZ4 rolling decompression for now

LZ4 rolling decompression [1] was introduced to reduce the memory footprint of temporary pages:

For many cases, it is needed for users to read small data within a compressed extent (pcluster), either due to random small read, or since uptodate folios (typically order-0) cannot be reused for decompression again since decompression algorithm refills already-uptodate folios.

Rolling decompression works because LZ4 is LZ77-based and only refers to the most recent 64 KiB of decompressed data, so in theory only a bounded rolling window of temporary pages is needed when decompressing.

It can save a lot of temporary memory, e.g. 601,960-byte data can be compressed into a 256k LZ4 compressed extent, which means it needs 146 extra pages per request in the worst case if rolling decompression is disabled.

However, the upstream LZ4 implementation is not under EROFS' control: For example, the literal copy memmove() may still copy long literals backward on x86 based on the address comparison even when the source and destination ranges do not overlap (IOWs, inline decompression doesn't need to be considered here). That breaks the rolling assumption and makes the optimization broken.

Disable it for now to make sure the data correctness first since EROFS is used everywhere now: The rolling window approach can be revived once we either ensure that the official LZ4 code always copies forward for non-overlapping ranges or maintain our own LZ4 implementation in EROFS.

The main impact is a higher runtime memory footprint; However, recent commit 0f6273ab4637 ("erofs: add a reserved buffer pool for lz4 decompression") helps mitigate this when enabled but it's still not perfect.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc19/presentation/gao § 3.3 Decompression

Affected Software

1 affected component
Linux Linux kernel

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

  1. Configuration

    Disable LZ4 rolling decompression for now in EROFS.

    EROFS LZ4 rolling decompression = disabled

Event History

Sep 25, 2026
CVE Published
via MITRE·10:24 AM
Data Sourced
via MITRE·10:24 AM
Description

Frequently Asked Questions

1

Which systems are exposed to this issue?

Exposure is limited to Linux systems using EROFS with LZ4-compressed data where the rolling decompression path is used. Reads of small or randomly accessed data within a compressed extent are examples of workloads described for this path.

2

What is the operational impact of disabling the affected behavior?

Disabling rolling decompression can significantly increase temporary-memory use during decompression. The description gives a worst-case example requiring 146 additional pages per request for a 601,960-byte dataset stored in a 256 KiB LZ4 compressed extent.

3

How can I determine whether a kernel includes the resolution?

The supplied data does not provide affected or fixed kernel version ranges. It provides three stable-kernel commit references, so kernel maintainers should compare their source or backport status against those referenced commits.

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