7.8 - RHSA-2010:0398

Problem Description:

Updated kernel packages that fix multiple security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) - i386, ia64, noarch, ppc, s390x, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) - i386, noarch, x86_64

3. Description:

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

This update fixes the following security issues:

* a flaw was found in the Unidirectional Lightweight Encapsulation (ULE) implementation. A remote attacker could send a specially-crafted ISO MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) frame to a target system, resulting in an infinite loop (denial of service). (CVE-2010-1086, Important)

* on AMD64 systems, it was discovered that the kernel did not ensure the ELF interpreter was available before making a call to the SET_PERSONALITY macro. A local attacker could use this flaw to cause a denial of service by running a 32-bit application that attempts to execute a 64-bit application. (CVE-2010-0307, Moderate)

* a flaw was found in the kernel connector implementation. A local, unprivileged user could trigger this flaw by sending an arbitrary number of notification requests using specially-crafted netlink messages, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2010-0410, Moderate)

* a flaw was found in the Memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) instruction decoder in the Xen hypervisor implementation. An unprivileged guest user could use this flaw to trick the hypervisor into emulating a certain instruction, which could crash the guest (denial of service). (CVE-2010-0730, Moderate)

* a divide-by-zero flaw was found in the azx_position_ok() function in the driver for Intel High Definition Audio, snd-hda-intel. A local, unprivileged user could trigger this flaw to cause a kernel crash (denial of service). (CVE-2010-1085, Moderate)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* in some cases, booting a system with the "iommu=on" kernel parameter resulted in a Xen hypervisor panic. (BZ#580199)

* the fnic driver flushed the Rx queue instead of the Tx queue after fabric login. This caused crashes in some cases. (BZ#580829)

* "kernel unaligned access" warnings were logged to the dmesg log on some systems. (BZ#580832)

* the "Northbridge Error, node 1, core: -1 K8 ECC error" error occurred on some systems using the amd64_edac driver. (BZ#580836)

* in rare circumstances, when using kdump and booting a kernel with "crashkernel=128M@16M", the kdump kernel did not boot after a crash. (BZ#580838)

* TLB page table entry flushing was done incorrectly on IBM System z, possibly causing crashes, subtle data inconsistency, or other issues. (BZ#580839)

* iSCSI failover times were slower than in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3. (BZ#580840)

* fixed floating point state corruption after signal. (BZ#580841)

* in certain circumstances, under heavy load, certain network interface cards using the bnx2 driver and configured to use MSI-X, could stop processing interrupts and then network connectivity would cease. (BZ#587799)

* cnic parts resets could cause a deadlock when the bnx2 device was enslaved in a bonding device and that device had an associated VLAN. (BZ#581148)

* some BIOS implementations initialized interrupt remapping hardware in a way the Xen hypervisor implementation did not expect. This could have caused a system hang during boot. (BZ#581150)

* AMD Magny-Cours systems panicked when booting a 32-bit kernel. (BZ#580846)

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.

4. Solution:

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

To install kernel packages manually, use "rpm -ivh [package]". Do not use "rpm -Uvh" as that will remove the running kernel binaries from your system. You may use "rpm -e" to remove old kernels after determining that the new kernel functions properly on your system.

5. Bugs fixed (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/):

560547 - CVE-2010-0307 kernel: DoS on x86_64 561682 - CVE-2010-0410 kernel: OOM/crash in drivers/connector 567168 - CVE-2010-1085 kernel: ALSA: hda-intel: Avoid divide by zero crash 569237 - CVE-2010-1086 kernel: dvb-core: DoS bug in ULE decapsulation code 572971 - CVE-2010-0730 xen: emulator instruction decoding inconsistency 580199 - xen: clear ioapic registers on boot [rhel-5.5.z] 580829 - [Cisco 5.6 bug] fnic: flush Tx queue bug fix [rhel-5.5.z] 580832 - kernel unaligned messages from mptsas_firmware_event_work [rhel-5.5.z] 580836 - EDAC driver error on system with bad memory [rhel-5.5.z] 580838 - [5.4]System panic occurred during boot sequence with the server which carries 256GMB physical memory. [rhel-5.5.z] 580839 - kernel: correct TLB flush of page table entries concurrently used by another cpu [rhel-5.5.z] 580840 - REGRESSION: Fix iscsi failover time [rhel-5.5.z] 580841 - floating point register state corruption after handling SIGSEGV [rhel-5.5.z] 581148 - Kernel: network: bonding: scheduling while atomic: ifdown-eth/0x00000100/21775 [rhel-5.5.z] 581150 - [Intel 5.6 Virt Bug] [VT-d] Dom0 booting may hang on Westmere-EP with intremap enabled [rhel-5.5.z] 587799 - NIC doesn't register packets [rhel-5.5.z]