RHBA-2020:2268 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated devtoolset-9-binutils packages are now available as a part of Red Hat Developer Toolset for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Description

Binutils is a collection of binary utilities, including ar (for creating, modifying, and extracting from archives), as (a family of GNU assemblers), gprof (for displaying call graph profile data), ld (the GNU linker), nm (for listing symbols from object files), objcopy (for copying and translating object files), objdump (for displaying information from object files), ranlib (for generating an index for the contents of an archive), readelf (for displaying detailed information about binary files), size (for listing the section sizes of an object or archive file), strings (for listing printable strings from files), strip (for discarding symbols), and addr2line (for converting addresses to file and line). The devtoolset-9-binutils packages provide the Red Hat Developer Toolset 9 version of binutils.

This update fixes the following bug:

• 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#1779698)

For detailed changes in this release, see the Red Hat Developer Toolset 9.1 User Guide linked from the References section.

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 Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for System Z) 1 for RHEL 7.7 s390x
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for IBM Power LE) 1 for RHEL 7.7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for IBM Power) 1 for RHEL 7.7 ppc64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for System Z) 1 for RHEL 7.6 s390x
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for IBM Power LE) 1 for RHEL 7.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for IBM Power) 1 for RHEL 7.6 ppc64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for System Z) 1 for RHEL 7 s390x
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for IBM Power LE) 1 for RHEL 7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for IBM Power) 1 for RHEL 7 ppc64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server for ARM) 1 aarch64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Workstation) 1 for RHEL 7 x86_64

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_developer_toolset/9/html/user_guide/appe-changes_in_version_9.1