RHSA-2008:0957: Important: kernel security and bug fix update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linuxoperating system. the Xen implementation did not prevent applications running in a para-virtualized guest from modifying CR4 TSC. This could cause a localdenial of service. (CVE-2007-5907, Important) Tavis Ormandy reported missing boundary checks in the Virtual Dynamic Shared Objects (vDSO) implementation. This could allow a local unprivilegeduser to cause a denial of service or escalate privileges. (CVE-2008-3527,Important) the dotruncate() and genericfilesplicewrite() functions did not clear the setuid and setgid bits. This could allow a local unprivileged user toobtain access to privileged information. (CVE-2008-4210, CVE-2008-3833,Important) a flaw was found in the Linux kernel splice implementation. This could cause a local denial of service when there is a certain failure in theaddtopagecachelru() function. (CVE-2008-4302, Important) a flaw was found in the Linux kernel when running on AMD64 systems. During a context switch, EFLAGS were being neither saved nor restored. Thiscould allow a local unprivileged user to cause a denial of service.(CVE-2006-5755, Low) a flaw was found in the Linux kernel virtual memory implementation. This could allow a local unprivileged user to cause a denial of service.(CVE-2008-2372, Low) an integer overflow was discovered in the Linux kernel Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) implementation. This could allow aremote attacker to cause a denial of service. By default, remote DCCP isblocked by SELinux. (CVE-2008-3276, Low)In addition, these updated packages fix the following bugs: random32() seeding has been improved. in a multi-core environment, a race between the QP async event-handler and the destroqp() function could occur. This led to unpredictable resultsduring invalid memory access, which could lead to a kernel crash. a format string was omitted in the call to the requestmodule() function. a stack overflow caused by an infinite recursion bug in the binfmtmisc kernel module was corrected. the atascsirbufget() and atascsirbufput() functions now check for scatterlist usage before calling kmapatomic(). a sentinel NUL byte was added to the devicewrite() function to ensure that lspace.name is NUL-terminated. in the character device driver, a rangeisallowed() check was added to the readmem() and writemem() functions. It was possible for anillegitimate application to bypass these checks, and access /dev/mem beyondthe 1M limit by calling mmapmem() instead. Also, the parameters ofrangeisallowed() were changed to cleanly handle greater than 32-bits ofphysical address on 32-bit architectures. some of the newer Nehalem-based systems declare their CPU DSDT entries as type "Alias". During boot, this caused an "Error attaching device data"message to be logged. the evtchn event channel device lacked locks and memory barriers. This has led to xenstore becoming unresponsive on the Itanium(r) architecture. sending of gratuitous ARP packets in the Xen frontend network driver is now delayed until the backend signals that its carrier status has beenprocessed by the stack. on forcedeth devices, whenever setting ethtool parameters for link speed, the device could stop receiving interrupts. the CIFS 'forcedirectio' option did not allow text to be appended to files. the gettimeofday() function returned a backwards time on Intel(r) 64. residual-count corrections during UNDERRUN handling were added to the qla2xxx driver. the fix for a small quirk was removed for certain Adaptec controllers for which it caused problems. the "xm trigger init" command caused a domain panic if a userland application was running on a guest on the Intel(r) 64 architecture.Users of kernel should upgrade to these updated packages, which containbackported patches to correct these issues.