Linux CVE-2026-98684

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

smb: client: flush and commit data before querying allocated ranges

The mode 0 / FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE fallocate emulation for small interior ranges in smb3_simple_fallocate_range() issues FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES and zero-fills any sub-range the server reports as an unallocated hole, to force block allocation without changing file contents.

This is unsafe against Windows servers. Per the Win32 documentation, FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES only reports ranges that *may* contain nonzero data and is explicitly not coherent with recently written data:

"a call to FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES [after writing to a network file] would not necessarily return a correct list of allocated regions. To ensure coherency [...] flush the data to the file"

fsx (generic/363) reproduces the resulting corruption against Windows Server 2022: a range is written, an uncached read returns the data, yet the next FSCTL_QUERY_ALLOCATED_RANGES on that range reports it as a whole hole, so the emulation overwrites live data with zeroes. A network trace confirmed the WRITE, the READ returning data and the query returning an empty range list within microseconds. Samba does not exhibit this; its query is coherent with the written data.

Write back the dirty pages, drain any outstanding I/O and issue an SMB2 FLUSH to force the server to commit the data before querying the allocated ranges, so the query reflects the data actually present.

With this, generic/363 passes against both Windows Server 2022 and Samba over 100000 fsx operations.