RHBA-2017:2504 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated kernel packages that fix several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Description

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• When running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 VM with audit watches on

directories experiencing a high level activity, the system slowed due
to unnecessary requests for the process' credentials; DB2 workloads in
particular were affected. The provided patch is more selective about
acquiring process credentials,thus reducing the audit overhead and
restoring performance. (BZ#1460164)

• With a sunrpc regression in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9, timer code was removed that allowed the NFS client to reset a TCP connection stuck in FIN-WAIT-2 state. This fix adds TCP keepalives for NFS client TCP connections and allows the NFS client to recover the TCP connection if stuck in FIN-WAIT-2. (BZ#1462094)
• Due to a sunrpc regression introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 , an NFS client with TCP timestamps initiated a TCP disconnect sequence: the NFS TCP connection could not be reconnected for 60 seconds during the TIME_WAIT state because the source TCP port could not be re-used. As a consequence, during this 60 second period multiple side-effects occurred including unresponsive NFS mount points, an rpciod kernel thread consuming 100% CPU, the "retrans" number of "nfsstat -r" becoming a very large number. In addition, certain mount options returned "not responding" errors and even I/O errors could occur. With this update, a different source port is selected when an NFS TCP connection needs to reconnect during TIME_WAIT. As a result, the NFS TCP connection can reconnect immediately after a disconnect sequence and no longer waits 60 seconds for TIME_WAIT to complete. (BZ#1472128)
• While running automated array reboots on the InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA), the system experienced a kernel panic with the crash dump reporting the "Hard Lockup". The provided set of patches ensures the reboot path A fails over to the reboot path B without entering a kernel panic. (BZ#1462097)
• If multiple tasks attempted to read statistics for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Host Bus Adapter (HBA), the start_req_done completion could be re-initialized while still being used by another task. Consequently, the system crash occurred with the crash dump reporting the "Hard Lockup". This patch adds a mutex to serialize the calls to the bnx2fc_get_host_stats() function, thus fixing this bug. (BZ#1467323)

Users of kernel are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

Solution

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

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 for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)