A Debian project developers announced the suspension of the release of installation images with the Debian 12.3 update due to the discovery of an error in the Linux kernel that leads to data corruption 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, where a fix was ported, originally added to branch 6.5, addressing crashes due to a bug in the file size update code reduced after an operation with direct I/O and the O_SYNC flag. The damage is marked as non-critical (the exact meaning of this is not clarified, likely indicating data loss occurs under very rare circumstances or data is not irretrievably lost, but the file size becomes larger than the actual size).
In the context of Debian 12, the error was ported to the kernel package 6.1 after its synchronization with the release 6.1.64. During the discussion of the error, 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 issue, as there are no clearly related changes regarding VFS and Ext4 in kernel 6.1.66 (most likely, reference is made to the cessation of the issue's manifestation in the deb package based on kernel 6.1.66, while the actual fix was added to kernel branch 6.1.65, which contains changes related to Ext4).
Addition: To check the current version of the running kernel on Debian 12, use the command 'uname -a'; the error is contained in version 6.1.0-14. If this version is installed, as a workaround, it is suggested to use the previous kernel version since Debian keeps three kernel versions during updates.
Forrás: opennet.ru
