kernel security update

CentOS Errata and Security Advisory CESA-2008:0972

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux
operating system.

• a flaw was found in the Linux kernel’s Direct-IO implementation. This
  could have allowed a local unprivileged user to cause a denial of service.
  (CVE-2007-6716, Important)

• when running ptrace in 31-bit mode on an IBM S/390 or IBM System z
  kernel, a local unprivileged user could cause a denial of service by
  reading from or writing into a padding area in the user_regs_struct32
  structure. (CVE-2008-1514, Important)

• the do_truncate() and generic_file_splice_write() functions did not clear
  the setuid and setgid bits. This could have allowed a local unprivileged
  user to obtain access to privileged information. (CVE-2008-4210, Important)

• Tobias Klein reported a missing check in the Linux kernel’s Open Sound
  System (OSS) implementation. This deficiency could have led to an
  information leak. (CVE-2008-3272, Moderate)

• a potential denial of service attack was discovered in the Linux kernel’s
  PWC USB video driver. A local unprivileged user could have used this flaw
  to bring the kernel USB subsystem into the busy-waiting state.
  (CVE-2007-5093, Low)

• the ext2 and ext3 file systems code failed to properly handle corrupted
  data structures, leading to a possible local denial of service issue when
  read or write operations were performed. (CVE-2008-3528, Low)

In addition, these updated packages fix the following bugs:

• when using the CIFS “forcedirectio” option, appending to an open file on
  a CIFS share resulted in that file being overwritten with the data to be
  appended.

• a kernel panic occurred when a device with PCI ID 8086:10c8 was present
  on a system with a loaded ixgbe driver.

• due to an aacraid driver regression, the kernel failed to boot when trying
  to load the aacraid driver and printed the following error message:
  “aac_srb: aac_fib_send failed with status: 8195”.

• due to an mpt driver regression, when RAID 1 was configured on Primergy
  systems with an LSI SCSI IME 53C1020/1030 controller, the kernel panicked
  during boot.

• the mpt driver produced a large number of extraneous debugging messages
  when performing a “Host reset” operation.

• due to a regression in the sym driver, the kernel panicked when a SCSI
  hot swap was performed using MCP18 hardware.

• all cores on a multi-core system now scale their frequencies in
  accordance with the policy set by the system’s CPU frequency governor.

• the netdump subsystem suffered from several stability issues. These are
  addressed in this updated kernel.

• under certain conditions, the ext3 file system reported a negative count
  of used blocks.

• reading /proc/self/mem incorrectly returned “Invalid argument” instead of
  “input/output error” due to a regression.

• under certain conditions, the kernel panicked when a USB device was
  removed while the system was busy accessing the device.

• a race condition in the kernel could have led to a kernel crash during
  the creation of a new process.

All Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Users should upgrade to these updated
packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.

Merged security bulletin from advisories:
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-November/077586.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-November/077587.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-November/077605.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-November/077607.html

Affected packages:
kernel
kernel-devel
kernel-doc
kernel-hugemem
kernel-hugemem-devel
kernel-largesmp
kernel-largesmp-devel
kernel-smp
kernel-smp-devel
kernel-xenU
kernel-xenU-devel

Upstream details at:
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008:0972