CVE-2026-97547

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's XFS file system. When exchanging file ranges between files that share storage blocks (reflinks), a local user can trigger a condition where the system prematurely clears copy-on-write protection flags from a file that still retains shared data blocks. Consequently, subsequent write operations bypass Copy-on-Write (CoW) mechanisms and directly overwrite shared blocks, resulting in data corruption across related files.

This vulnerability is rated as Moderate because exploitation requires an authenticated local user with write access to files on an XFS filesystem and depends on specific range-swapping operations to induce data corruption. Although XFS is the default file system across Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations, triggering this behavior requires calling specialized range exchange interfaces on files with shared extents rather than standard file I/O workloads. Systems operating on earlier enterprise releases lack the underlying exchange functionality entirely and remain unaffected.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.