RHSA-2010:0660: Important: kernel security and bug fix update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linuxoperating system.This update fixes the following security issues: when an application has a stack overflow, the stack could silently overwrite another memory mapped area instead of a segmentation faultoccurring, which could cause an application to execute arbitrary code,possibly leading to privilege escalation. It is known that the X WindowSystem server can be used to trigger this flaw. (CVE-2010-2240, Important) a miscalculation of the size of the free space of the initial directory entry in a directory leaf block was found in the Linux kernel Global FileSystem 2 (GFS2) implementation. A local, unprivileged user with writeaccess to a GFS2-mounted file system could perform a rename operation onthat file system to trigger a NULL pointer dereference, possibly resultingin a denial of service or privilege escalation. (CVE-2010-2798, Important)Red Hat would like to thank the X.Org security team for reportingCVE-2010-2240, with upstream acknowledging Rafal Wojtczuk as the originalreporter; and Grant Diffey of CenITex for reporting CVE-2010-2798.This update also fixes the following bugs: the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 General Availability (GA) release introduced a regression in iSCSI failover time. While there was heavy I/Oon the iSCSI layer, attempting to log out of an iSCSI connection at thesame time a network problem was occurring, such as a switch dying or acable being pulled out, resulted in iSCSI failover taking several minutes.With this update, failover occurs as expected. (BZ#583898) a bug was found in the way the megaraidsas driver (for SAS based RAID controllers) handled physical disks and management IOCTLs. All physicaldisks were exported to the disk layer, allowing an oops inmegasascompletecmddpc() when completing the IOCTL command if a timeoutoccurred. One possible trigger for this bug was running "mkfs". This updateresolves this issue by updating the megaraidsas driver to version 4.31.(BZ#619362) this update upgrades the bnx2x driver to version 1.52.1-6, and the bnx2x firmware to version 1.52.1-6, incorporating multiple bug fixes andenhancements. These fixes include: A race condition on systems using thebnx2x driver due to multiqueue being used to transmit data, but only asingle queue transmit ON/OFF scheme being used (only a single queue isused with this update); a bug that could have led to a kernel panic whenusing iSCSI offload; and a bug that caused a firmware crash, causingnetwork devices using the bnx2x driver to lose network connectivity. Whenthis firmware crash occurred, errors such as "timeout polling for state"and "Stop leading failed!" were logged. A system reboot was required torestore network connectivity. (BZ#620663, BZ#620668, BZ#620669, BZ#620665)Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backportedpatches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for thisupdate to take effect.