RHBA-2008:0083 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated glibc packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements
are now available.

Description

The GNU libc packages (known as glibc) contain the standard C libraries
used by applications.

These updated glibc packages provide fixes for the following bugs:

• threaded statically-linked binaries caused an error when attempting to

debug them with the gdb debugger.

• installation of glibc would fail when the /usr directory was on a

different partition than the / partition.

• getaddressinfo has been updated to treat optimistic addresses as

deprecated addresses, in accordance with RFC 4429.

• when using the si_LK locale, the GNOME panel's clock applet would show

the month of February incorrectly.

• a deadlock in the ld.so shared object library caused certain applications

such as Pulseaudio to hang.

• the clntudp_call() function would sporadically hang under certain conditions.
• when attempting to restart paranoia, the name service caching daemon

(nscd) would segfault whenever one of the caches was disabled.

• added an sfence instruction to x86_64 memset after the movnti instructions.
• iconv did not correctly translate certain characters into the

iso-2022-jp//translit encoding.

• the calloc() function would sometimes return non-zero-filled-buffers due

to an issue with madvise.

• in a multithreaded environment, the strerror() function caused a segfault

under certain circumstances.

• the sorting behavior of the getaddrinfo() function has been modified.

However, the getaddrinfo RFC3484 sorting changes are not enabled by default
for compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and 5.1. To enable
better RFC3484-compliant behavior, the /etc/gai.conf configuration file
needs to be present and must contain at least one newly-supported scopev4
directive. Here is an example of such a scopev4 directive that should be
placed in /etc/gai.conf:

scopev4 ::ffff:169.254.0.0/112 2
scopev4 ::ffff:127.0.0.0/104 2
scopev4 ::ffff:10.0.0.0/104 5
scopev4 ::ffff:172.16.0.0/108 5
scopev4 ::ffff:192.168.0.0/112 5
scopev4 ::ffff:0.0.0.0/96 14

In addition, these updated packages provide the following enhancements:

• support has been added for an optimized memcpy string routine.
• password files in /etc/shadow can now be encrypted using the stronger

SHA-256 hash algorithm.

• support for the PowerPC-64 memset optimizations has been enabled.

Users are advised to upgrade to these updated glibc packages, which resolve
these issues and add these enhancements.

Solution

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

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red
Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 259681 - need to enhance getaddrinfo to support optimistic addresses
• BZ - 282201 - [si_LK]: gnome clock applet showing February month incorrectly
• BZ - 380751 - Shadow password encryption
• BZ - 397021 - Problems converting to iso-2022-jp//translit
• BZ - 405781 - calloc() broken when process address space is locked

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)