RHBA-2020:1156 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An update for binutils is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Description

The binutils packages provide a collection of binary utilities for the manipulation of object code in various object file formats. It includes the ar, as, gprof, ld, nm, objcopy, objdump, ranlib, readelf, size, strings, strip, and addr2line utilities.

For detailed changes in this release, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8 Release Notes.

Bug Fix(es):

• Certain Intel CPUs are affected by the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) bug causing machine instructions to be executed incorrectly. Consequently, the affected CPUs might not execute programs properly. The full fix involves updating the microcode of vulnerable CPUs, which can cause a performance degradation. This update enables a workaround in the assembler that helps to mitigate the performance loss. The workaround is not enabled by default.

To apply the workaround, recompile a program using GCC with the "-Wa,-mbranches-within-32B-boundaries" command-line option. A program recompiled with this command-line option will not be affected by JCC flaw, but the microcode update is still necessary in order to fully protect a system.

Note that applying the workaround will increase the size of the program and there can still be a slight performance decrease, although it should be less than it would have been without the recompilation. (BZ#1778892)

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 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 Power, big endian 7 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 Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 7 s390x
• 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 - 1749085 - Backport workaround for "bfd elf.c assertion for multiple relocations to same section" [rhel-7.8]

CVEs

(none)

References

• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.8_release_notes/index