CVE-2026-98996CVE-2026-98996

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fs: don't silently unmount busy mounts The propagate_mount_busy() helper exists to decide whether a synchronous can suceed. It does that by looking at the copies of the victims in the mounts its parent propagates to. One of those functions from propagation hell. It skips a copy that has child mounts except for the case of a single child mount covering the copy's root. That algorithm used to be exact. It isn't anymore. Originally only childless copies were unmounted during propagation. And 1064f874abc0 ("mnt: Tuck mounts under others instead of creating shadow/side mounts.") ended up adding covered mounts to both sides in one go. Along came 99b19d16471e ("mnt: In propgate_umount handle visiting mounts in any order") and that started to unmount more than before: [1]: A copy of a mount is unmounted when each of its children is either its overmount or a copy of the victim itself. In the former case the over