| Description: | The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
This update fixes the following security issues:
multiple, missing initialization flaws were found in the Linux kernel. Padding data in several core network structures was not initialized properly before being sent to user-space. These flaws could lead to information leaks. (CVE-2005-4881, CVE-2009-3228, Moderate)
This update also fixes the following bugs:
a packet duplication issue was fixed via the RHSA-2008:0665 update; however, the fix introduced a problem for systems using network bonding: Backup slaves were unable to receive ARP packets. When using network bonding in the "active-backup" mode and with the "arp_validate=3" option, the bonding driver considered such backup slaves as being down (since they were not receiving ARP packets), preventing successful failover to these devices. (BZ#519384)
due to insufficient memory barriers in the network code, a process sleeping in select() may have missed notifications about new data. In rare cases, this bug may have caused a process to sleep forever. (BZ#519386)
the driver version number in the ata_piix driver was not changed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8, even though changes had been made between these releases. This could have prevented the driver from loading on systems that check driver versions, as this driver appeared older than it was. (BZ#519389)
a bug in nlm_lookup_host() could have led to un-reclaimed locks on file systems, resulting in the umount command failing. This bug could have also prevented NFS services from being relocated correctly in clustered environments. (BZ#519656)
the data buffer ethtool_get_strings() allocated, for the igb driver, was smaller than the amount of data that was copied in igb_get_strings(), because of a miscalculation in IGB_QUEUE_STATS_LEN, resulting in memory corruption. This bug could have led to a kernel panic. (BZ#522738)
in some circumstances, write operations to a particular TTY device opened by more than one user (eg, one opened it as /dev/console and the other opened it as /dev/ttyS0) were blocked. If one user opened the TTY terminal without setting the O_NONBLOCK flag, this user's write operations were suspended if the output buffer was full or if a STOP (Ctrl-S) signal was sent. As well, because the O_NONBLOCK flag was not respected, Write operations for user terminals opened with the O_NONBLOCK flag set were also blocked. This update re-implements TTY locks, ensuring O_NONBLOCK works as expected, even if it a STOP signal is sent from another terminal. (BZ#523930)
a deadlock was found in the cciss driver. In rare cases, this caused an NMI lockup during boot. Messages such as "cciss: controller cciss[x] failed, stopping." and "cciss[x]: controller not responding." may have been displayed on the console. (BZ#525725)
on 64-bit PowerPC systems, a rollover bug in the ibmveth driver could have caused a kernel panic. In a reported case, this panic occurred on a system with a large uptime and under heavy network load. (BZ#527225)
Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.
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