RHSA-2009:1211: Important: kernel security and bug fix update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linuxoperating system.These updated packages fix the following security issues: Michael Tokarev reported a flaw in the Realtek r8169 Ethernet driver in the Linux kernel. This driver allowed interfaces using this driver toreceive frames larger than what could be handled. This could lead to aremote denial of service or code execution. (CVE-2009-1389, Important) a buffer overflow flaw was found in the CIFSTCon() function of the Linux kernel Common Internet File System (CIFS) implementation. When mounting aCIFS share, a malicious server could send an overly-long string to theclient, possibly leading to a denial of service or privilege escalation onthe client mounting the CIFS share. (CVE-2009-1439, Important) several flaws were found in the way the Linux kernel CIFS implementation handles Unicode strings. CIFS clients convert Unicode strings sent by aserver to their local character sets, and then write those strings intomemory. If a malicious server sent a long enough string, it could writepast the end of the target memory region and corrupt other memory areas,possibly leading to a denial of service or privilege escalation on theclient mounting the CIFS share. (CVE-2009-1633, Important)These updated packages also fix the following bugs: when using network bonding in the "balance-tlb" or "balance-alb" mode, the primary setting for the primary slave device was lost when saiddevice was brought down (ifdown). Bringing the slave interface back up(ifup) did not restore the primary setting (the device was not made theactive slave). (BZ#507563) a bug in timerinterrupt() may have caused the system time to move up to two days or more into the future, or to be delayed for several minutes.This bug only affected Intel 64 and AMD64 systems that have the HighPrecision Event Timer (HPET) enabled in the BIOS, and could have causedproblems for applications that require timing to be accurate. (BZ#508835) a race condition was resolved in the Linux kernel block layer between showpartition() and rescanpartitions(). This could have caused a NULLpointer dereference in showpartition(), leading to a system crash (kernelpanic). This issue was most likely to occur on systems running monitoringsoftware that regularly scanned hard disk partitions, or from repeatedlyrunning commands that probe for partition information. (BZ#512310) previously, the Stratus memory tracker missed certain modified pages. With this update, information about the type of page (small page orhuge page) is passed to the Stratus memory tracker, which resolves thisissue. The fix for this issue does not affect systems that do not usememory tracking. (BZ#513182) a bug may have caused a system crash when using the cciss driver, due to an uninitialized kernel structure. A reported case of this issue occurredafter issuing consecutive SCSI TUR commands (sgturs sends SCSItest-unit-ready commands in a loop). (BZ#513189) a bug in the SCSI implementation caused "Aborted Command - internal target failure" errors to be sent to Device-Mapper Multipath, withoutretries, resulting in Device-Mapper Multipath marking the path as failedand making a path group switch. With this update, all errors that return asense key in the SCSI mid layer (including "Aborted Command - internaltarget failure") are retried. (BZ#514007)Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backportedpatches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for thisupdate to take effect.