RHSA-2008:0972: Important: kernel security and bug fix update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linuxoperating 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 byreading from or writing into a padding area in the userregsstruct32structure. (CVE-2008-1514, Important) the dotruncate() and genericfilesplicewrite() functions did not clear the setuid and setgid bits. This could have allowed a local unprivilegeduser 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 aninformation 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 flawto 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 whenread 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 beappended. 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:"aacsrb: aacfibsend 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 panickedduring 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 updatedpackages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.