RHBA-2011:1607 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated fcoe-utils package that fixes several bugs and adds various
enhancements is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The fcoe-utils package provides Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) utilities,
such as the fcoeadm command line tool for configuring FCoE interfaces, and the
fcoemon service to configure DCB Ethernet QOS filters.

The fcoe-utils package has been upgraded to upstream version 1.0.20, which
provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version.
(BZ#695941)

In addition, this update fixes the following bugs:

• When stopping the fcoe service, the fcoe initscript did not properly clean up

after itself as expected (did not remove FCoE devices, kill related processes
and unload FCoE drivers). As a consequence, FCoE interfaces were not brought
down and FCoE related threads were still running after the fcoe had been
stopped. The "service fcoe stop" command is used to ensure safe after-update
service restarts on FCoE dependent systems, therefore it cannot be used to
remove FCoE devices and unload related kernel modules. Concerning this
situation, the initscript has been modified to use the "stop force" command
option to completely remove FCoE devices and unload related kernel modules. The
fcoe service now should be stopped using the "service fcoe stop force" command.
(BZ#639466)

• When removing a network interface with no fcoe port using the "fcoeadm -d"

command, the fcoe port state machine set the removal operation incorrectly to
wait without responding to fcoemon. This led to an internal error because
fcoemon timed out waiting for the response. To resolve the problem, the code has
been modified to return the code for no further action under these
circumstances. The "fcoeadm -d" command now works for interfaces without the
fcoe port as expected. (BZ#732485)

• The fcoemon service did not maintain any information about the relative state

of a physical network interface and its dependent VLAN interfaces. As a
consequence, the fcoe port of the VLAN interface could have been out of sync
with the fcoe port of the physical device, resulting in undesired behavior, such
as processing link events improperly. To fix this problem, a ready flag has been
introduced. This flag is set to false when the physical port is disabled. Link
events are now processed correctly for the vlan ports. (BZ#732485)

• When answering to an FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) VLAN Discovery

request, some switches encapsulate FIP VLAN Discovery replies in a VLAN 0 tag
which is wrapped around the packet's FIP frame header. Previously, when a packet
containing such a reply reached a target network interface, some devices did not
remove the VLAN tag before they started to process the FIP header. If the VLAN
tag was not removed, the length of the processed header was larger than was
expected, therefore the FIP parsing logic was not able to parse the FIP header
correctly causing a loss of the packet. With this update, the parsing logic has
been modified to skip over the VLAN header when necessary, and point to the
correct start of the FIP header. (BZ#732485)

• The timeout for a kernel reply to fcoeadm operations was set to 5 seconds,

which was not enough when processing an fcoeadm operation on a system with a
large number of FCoE ports while a kernel was under heavy load. As a
consequence, the "internal error" message was displayed even though the
operation was finished successfully. To prevent this bug, the timeout for the
kernel reply was increased to 30 seconds. No error message is now sent when an
fcoeadm operation succeeds. (BZ#743689)

All users of fcoe-utils are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which
fixes these bugs and adds these enhancements.

Solution

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

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)