RHEA-2011:1562 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

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

Description

The powerpc-utils package provides various utilities for a PowerPC platform.

The powerpc-utils package has been upgraded to upstream version 1.2.10, which
provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. The
powerpc-utils package now provides the following new features:

• The page coalescing feature that provides the ability to share identical pages

in physical memory among multiple logical partitions. Identical pages are
consolidated into one shared read-only copy, and expanded into individual copies
if an individual partition change occurs. (BZ#694541)

• The lparstat tool that provides the ability to display various attributes of

IBM Power Logical Partitions, such as CPU and memory entitlement and other
similar attributes. (BZ#632705)

In addition, this update fixes the following three bugs:

• When removing memory from logical partition (LPAR) in Dynamic Logical

Partitioning (DLPAR), the dynamic memory manager (drmgr) did not set the memory
off-line correctly. As a consequence, the kernel of the LPAR panicked. This
update corrects the code so that drmgr now sets memory off-line properly, and
the kernel no longer crashes when removing memory in DLPAR. (BZ#698433)

• The drmgr(8) manual page contained obsolete information that drmgr is a part

of the ppc64-utils suite. This has been corrected, and the manual page now
states that drmgr is a part of the powerpc-utils suite. (BZ#739888)

• The ofpathname script was not able to convert the Open Firmware device path

name to the logical device name for SAN disks. With this update, ofpathname
converts path names to device names correctly. (BZ#739957)

All users of powerpc-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
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)