The Debian project developers have announced the suspension of publishing installation images with the Debian 12.3 update due to the discovery of a bug in the Linux kernel that leads to corruption of data in the Ext4 file system. Users with already installed systems are advised to refrain from installing kernel package updates from the repository until a fix is published.
The issue manifests in the stable branch of the Linux kernel 6.1, to which a fix was backported that was originally added in the 6.5 branch, addressing crashes due to a bug in the file size update code that decreased after a direct I/O operation with the O_SYNC flag. The corruption is classified as non-critical (the exact meaning of this is not clarified; it likely implies that data loss occurs under very rare circumstances or that data is not irretrievably lost, but the file size becomes larger than actual).
In the context of Debian 12, the bug was backported to the 6.1 kernel package after its synchronization with the 6.1.64 release. During the discussion of the bug, Debian developers mentioned that the issue was fixed in update 6.1.66, but it is currently unclear which of the fixes added in this release resolves the problem, as there are no explicitly related changes to VFS and Ext4 in the 6.1.66 kernel (most likely, the discussion is about the problem ceasing to manifest in the deb package based on the kernel 6.1.66, while the actual fix was added in the 6.1.65 kernel branch, which includes changes related to Ext4).
Note: You can check the current version of the running kernel on Debian 12 using the command "uname -a"; the issue is present in the kernel version 6.1.0-14. If this version is installed, it is advised to use the previous kernel version as a workaround, since Debian retains three kernel versions during updates.
Source: opennet.ru
