| Description: | The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
These updated packages fix the following security issues:
a flaw in the hypervisor for hosts running on Itanium architectures allowed an Intel VTi domain to read arbitrary physical memory from other Intel VTi domains, which could make information available to unauthorized users. (CVE-2007-6207, Important)
two buffer overflow flaws were found in ISDN subsystem. A local unprivileged user could use these flaws to cause a denial of service. (CVE-2007-5938: Important, CVE-2007-6063: Moderate)
a possible NULL pointer dereference was found in the subsystem used for showing CPU information, as used by CHRP systems on PowerPC architectures. This may have allowed a local unprivileged user to cause a denial of service (crash). (CVE-2007-6694, Moderate)
a flaw was found in the handling of zombie processes. A local user could create processes that would not be properly reaped, possibly causing a denial of service. (CVE-2006-6921, Moderate)
As well, these updated packages fix the following bugs:
a bug was found in the Linux kernel audit subsystem. When the audit daemon was setup to log the execve system call with a large number of arguments, the kernel could run out of memory, causing a kernel panic.
on IBM System z architectures, using the IBM Hardware Management Console to toggle IBM FICON channel path ids (CHPID) caused a file ID miscompare, possibly causing data corruption.
when running the IA-32 Execution Layer (IA-32EL) or a Java VM on Itanium architectures, a bug in the address translation in the hypervisor caused the wrong address to be registered, causing Dom0 to hang.
on Itanium architectures, frequent Corrected Platform Error errors may have caused the hypervisor to hang.
when enabling a CPU without hot plug support, routines for checking the presence of the CPU were missing. The CPU tried to access its own resources, causing a kernel panic.
after updating to kernel-2.6.18-53.el5, a bug in the CCISS driver caused the HP Array Configuration Utility CLI to become unstable, possibly causing a system hang, or a kernel panic.
a bug in NFS directory caching could have caused different hosts to have different views of NFS directories.
on Itanium architectures, the Corrected Machine Check Interrupt masked hot-added CPUs as disabled.
when running Oracle database software on the Intel 64 and AMD64 architectures, if an SGA larger than 4GB was created, and had hugepages allocated to it, the hugepages were not freed after database shutdown.
in a clustered environment, when two or more NFS clients had the same logical volume mounted, and one of them modified a file on the volume, NULL characters may have been inserted, possibly causing data corruption.
These updated packages resolve several severe issues in the lpfc driver:
a system hang after LUN discovery.
a general fault protection, a NULL pointer dereference, or slab corruption could occur while running a debug on the kernel.
the inability to handle kernel paging requests in "lpfc_get_scsi_buf".
erroneous structure references caused certain FC discovery routines to reference and change "lpfc_nodelist" structures, even after they were freed.
the lpfc driver failed to interpret certain fields correctly, causing tape backup software to fail. Tape drives reported "Illegal Request".
the lpfc driver did not clear structures correctly, resulting in SCSI I/Os being rejected by targets, and causing errors.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues.
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