RHBA-2018:0416 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An update of the systemd packages is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Description

The systemd packages contain systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with the SysV and LSB init scripts. It provides aggressive parallelism capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, and keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups. In addition, it supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can also work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• If the call of the fork() function failed during the startup of a service, systemd terminated unexpectedly. Consequently, users had to reboot the machine. With this update, systemd has been fixed to print an error message instead of terminating and stopping handling the requests. As a result, systemd keeps working in the described situation. (BZ#1546658)
• If journald rotated the log files quickly enough, and the application which was using the sd_journal API did not read messages fast enough, the API sometimes started losing messages about deleted files. Consequently, the sd_journal API did not close file descriptors for such files, and they were never removed from the disk. To fix this problem, the sd_journal API now reiterates through files, finds those that were removed, and closes their file descriptors, if it detects the loss of messages about deleted files. As a result, the kernel is now able to delete the files completely from the disk. (BZ#1547373)
• Previously, the journalctl utility stopped when it encountered an empty file in the systemd journal logs. With this update, systemd has been fixed to report an error message about such situation, and to continue scanning other files in the journal log under the described circumstances. (BZ#1549474)

Users of systemd are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs.

Solution

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

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

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

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 7 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.7 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.5 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.4 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian 7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.5 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.4 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 7 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM 64 7 aarch64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power 9 7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for Power LE - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for Power LE - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for Power LE - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.4 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support for IBM Power, big endian 7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support for IBM Power, little endian 7 ppc64le

Fixes

• BZ - 1544748 - _CGROUP_CONTROLLER_MASK_ALL does not cover CGROUP_PIDS [rhel-7.4.z]
• BZ - 1546658 - systemd stops servicing with "Freezing execution" message upon memory exhaustion [rhel-7.4.z]
• BZ - 1547373 - sd_journal can "leak" fds if it starts dropping inotify events [rhel-7.4.z]
• BZ - 1549474 - journalctl stops working as soon as it encounters an empty journal file [rhel-7.4.z]

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)