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

gfs2: ignore negated quota changes

When lots of quota changes are made, there may be cases in which an
inode’s quota information is increased and then decreased, such as when
blocks are added to a file, then deleted from it. If the timing is
right, function do_qc can add pending quota changes to a transaction,
then later, another call to do_qc can negate those changes, resulting
in a net gain of 0. The quota_change information is recorded in the qc
buffer (and qd element of the inode as well). The buffer is added to the
transaction by the first call to do_qc, but a subsequent call changes
the value from non-zero back to zero. At that point it’s too late to
remove the buffer_head from the transaction. Later, when the quota sync
code is called, the zero-change qd element is discovered and flagged as
an assert warning. If the fs is mounted with errors=panic, the kernel
will panic.

This is usually seen when files are truncated and the quota changes are
negated by punch_hole/truncate which uses gfs2_quota_hold and
gfs2_quota_unhold rather than block allocations that use gfs2_quota_lock
and gfs2_quota_unlock which automatically do quota sync.

This patch solves the problem by adding a check to qd_check_sync such
that net-zero quota changes already added to the transaction are no
longer deemed necessary to be synced, and skipped.

In this case references are taken for the qd and the slot from do_qc
so those need to be put. The normal sequence of events for a normal
non-zero quota change is as follows:

gfs2_quota_change
do_qc

  qd_hold
  slot_hold

Later, when the changes are to be synced:

gfs2_quota_sync
qd_fish

  qd_check_sync
     gets qd ref via lockref_get_not_dead

do_sync

  do_qc(QC_SYNC)
     qd_put
    lockref_put_or_lock

qd_unlock

  qd_put
     lockref_put_or_lock

In the net-zero change case, we add a check to qd_check_sync so it puts
the qd and slot references acquired in gfs2_quota_change and skip the
unneeded sync.