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redhatRedHatRHSA-2008:1017
HistoryDec 16, 2008 - 12:00 a.m.

(RHSA-2008:1017) Important: kernel security and bug fix update

2008-12-1600:00:00
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24

EPSS

0.095

Percentile

94.9%

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

  • Olaf Kirch reported a flaw in the i915 kernel driver. This flaw could,
    potentially, lead to local privilege escalation. Note: the flaw only
    affects systems based on the Intel G33 Express Chipset and newer.
    (CVE-2008-3831, Important)

  • Miklos Szeredi reported a missing check for files opened with O_APPEND in
    the sys_splice(). This could allow a local, unprivileged user to bypass the
    append-only file restrictions. (CVE-2008-4554, Important)

  • a deficiency was found in the Linux kernel Stream Control Transmission
    Protocol (SCTP) implementation. This could lead to a possible denial of
    service if one end of a SCTP connection did not support the AUTH extension.
    (CVE-2008-4576, Important)

In addition, these updated packages fix the following bugs:

  • on Itaniumยฎ systems, when a multithreaded program was traced using the
    command โ€œstrace -fโ€, messages such as

    PANIC: attached pid 10740 exited
    PANIC: handle_group_exit: 10740 leader 10721
    โ€ฆ

will be displayed, and after which the trace would stop. With these
updated packages, โ€œstrace -fโ€ command no longer results in these error
messages, and strace terminates normally after tracing all threads.

  • on big-endian systems such as PowerPC, the getsockopt() function
    incorrectly returned 0 depending on the parameters passed to it when the
    time to live (TTL) value equaled 255.

  • when using an NFSv4 file system, accessing the same file with two
    separate processes simultaneously resulted in the NFS client process
    becoming unresponsive.

  • on AMD64 and Intelยฎ 64 hypervisor-enabled systems, when a syscall
    correctly returned โ€˜-1โ€™ in code compiled on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the
    same code, when run with the strace utility, would incorrectly return an
    invalid return value. This has been fixed: on AMD64 and Intelยฎ 64
    hypervisor-enabled systems, syscalls in compiled code return the same,
    correct values as syscalls run with strace.

  • on the Itaniumยฎ architecture, fully-virtualized guest domains created
    using more than 64 GB of memory caused other guest domains not to receive
    interrupts. This caused soft lockups on other guests. All guest domains are
    now able to receive interrupts regardless of their allotted memory.

  • when user-space used SIGIO notification, which was not disabled before
    closing a file descriptor and was then re-enabled in a different process,
    an attempt by the kernel to dereference a stale pointer led to a kernel
    crash. With this fix, such a situation no longer causes a kernel crash.

  • modifications to certain pages made through a memory-mapped region could
    have been lost in cases when the NFS client needed to invalidate the page
    cache for that particular memory-mapped file.

  • fully-virtualized Windowsยฎ guests became unresponsive due to the vIOSAPIC
    component being multiprocessor-unsafe. With this fix, vIOSAPIC is
    multiprocessor-safe and Windows guests do not become unresponsive.

  • on certain systems, keyboard controllers could not withstand continuous
    requests to switch keyboard LEDs on or off. This resulted in some or all
    key presses not being registered by the system.

  • on the Itaniumยฎ architecture, setting the โ€œvm.nr_hugepagesโ€ sysctl
    parameter caused a kernel stack overflow resulting in a kernel panic, and
    possibly stack corruption. With this fix, setting vm.nr_hugepages works
    correctly.

  • hugepages allow the Linux kernel to utilize the multiple page size
    capabilities of modern hardware architectures. In certain configurations,
    systems with large amounts of memory could fail to allocate most of this
    memory for hugepages even if it was free. This could result, for example,
    in database restart failures.

Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported
patches to correct these issues.