(RHSA-2017:1766) Important: kernel security and bug fix update

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

Security Fix(es):

• The NFSv2 and NFSv3 server implementations in the Linux kernel through 4.10.13 lacked certain checks for the end of a buffer. A remote attacker could trigger a pointer-arithmetic error or possibly cause other unspecified impacts using crafted requests related to fs/nfsd/nfs3xdr.c and fs/nfsd/nfsxdr.c. (CVE-2017-7895, Important)

Red Hat would like to thank Ari Kauppi for reporting this issue.

Bug Fix(es):

• Previously, a race condition between Linux kernel module error handling and kprobe registration code existed in the Linux kernel. The protection that was applied during module error handling code could be overridden by kprobe registration code before the module was deallocated. Consequently, the mapped page could be freed and become not ‘writable’. When this page was later accessed, a page fault occurred, which led to a kernel panic. This update fixes the race condition, and the kernel no longer panics due to this bug. (BZ#1454683)

• Due to a race with another NFS mount, the nfs41_walk_client_list() function previously established a lease on the nfs_client pointer before the check for trunking was finished. This update ensures the processes follow the correct order and the race no longer occurs in this scenario. (BZ#1447383)

• If a duplicate IPv6 address or an issue setting an address was present in the net/ipv6/addrconf.c file, a race condition occurred that could cause an IFP refcount leak. Attempts to unregister a netdevice then produced “Unregister Netdevice Failed” error messages. The provided patch fixes this bug, and race conditions no longer occur in this situation. (BZ#1449103)

• Previously, subtracting from vCPU threads could cause a steal_time overflow on QEMU live migration. This update makes sure steal_time accumulation to vCPU entry time is moved before copying steal_time data to QEMU guest, thus fixing this bug. (BZ#1274919)