RHBA-2009:0237 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

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

Description

The mkinitrd utility creates file system images for use as initial ramdisk
(initrd) images.

This update includes fixes for the following bugs:

• the mkinitrd man page for the "--omit-scsi-modules" option has been

revised, with the following sentence added to the documentation:

"If the root partition is on a scsi device, mkinitrd will still include the
necessary scsi modules to support that device."

• previously, mkinitrd set the permission level of the "/dev" directory to

0755. With this update mkinitrd now ensures that the permissions of this
directory is 1777.

• the NFS mount options provided by nash were incomplete. With this update,

the standard NFS mount options are now fully implemented in nash.

• mkinitrd was not including the kernel modules dm-mem-cache.ko,

dm-region_hash.ko, dm-message.ko and dm-raid45.ko when creating the initrd
image on a system using RAID5. Consequently, the kernel would panic during
initial bootup. With this update mkinitrd has been corrected to include
these modules, which resolves this issue.

• mkinitrd was not allowing enough time to scan SCSI devices before

scanning for logical volumes. With this update this timeout value has been
increased to 10 seconds.

• on IBM System z machines, the new-kernel-pkg script was truncating the

labels of the kernel entries in zipl.conf to 15 characters. Consequently,
if two kernel labels were identical in the first 15 characters, an error
message like the following would be returned:

Error: Config file '/etc/zipl.conf': Line 8: section name '2.6.18-53.1.4.e'
already specified

With this update, this limit has been increased to 256 characters, which
resolves this issue.

• a bug that could sometimes prevent mkinitrd from updating the kernel is

now fixed. In previous releases, mkinitrd could hang while installing a
new kernel, resulting in a 'line 368: cd: slaves: No such file
or directory' error. This was because findstoragedriverinsys() function
incorrectly tried to access an inexistent /sys/block/hda/hda2/slaves/
directory.

The following enhancements are provided by this update:

• mkinitrd now supports %posttrans and %preun hooks, which run specific

Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) scripts when a new kernel is installed
(or if a kernel package is removed). These scripts both compile and remove
drivers automatically. When a new kernel is installed, they automatically
compile the drivers they reference. When a kernel package is removed, they
automatically remove the drivers they previously compiled.

• with this update, mkinitrd now supports encrypted block devices.
• support has been added to mkinitrd to allow booting from KVM Virtio

devices.

• with this update mkinitrd now supports iSCSI devices with multipath

configurations.

• The build requires dependency for mkinitrd has been updated to ensure

that the libdhcp-devel package is version 1.21 or newer.

Users of mkinitrd are advised to upgrade to these updated 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 - 426992 - kernel-debug and kernel packages use the same label in zipl.conf
• BZ - 444973 - nash nfsmount doesn't respect mount options + proposed patch
• BZ - 447375 - [Netapp 5.3 bug] mkinitrd doesn't provide complete support for SANBoot.(root on multipath iSCSI).
• BZ - 447841 - prevents new kernels from installing
• BZ - 451670 - mkinitrd does not support encrypted block devices
• BZ - 461850 - mkinitd doesn't wait for scsi to come up
• BZ - 464636 - scsi scan not waiting long enough
• BZ - 467839 - mkinitrd doesn't know how to handle encrypted CCISS devices
• BZ - 471689 - RHEL 5.3 Snapshot 2 fails to activate sw raid devices, unable to install to sw raid mirror
• BZ - 476866 - mkinitrd fails to include the correct modules when creating initrd image for raid5

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)