RHEA-2015:0371 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

Updated oprofile packages that fix two bugs and add various enhancements are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Description

OProfile is a system-wide profiler for Linux systems. The profiling runs
transparently in the background and profile data can be collected at any time. OProfile uses the hardware performance counters provided on many processors and can use the Real Time Clock (RTC) for profiling on processors without counters.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, on some IBM POWER8 systems, the oprofile utility did not properly identify the processor type. As a consequence, the "operf" and "ocount" commands failed to collect performance data and printed the following error message instead:

Unable to open cpu_type file for reading
Make sure you have done opcontrol --init
Unable to find default event

With this update, oprofile has been fixed to correctly identify the missing
variants of IBM POWER8 processors, and the described problem no longer occurs. (BZ#1148525)

• On IBM POWER systems, the operf utility did not handle invalid or empty arguments for the "-e, --event" option properly. Consequently, operf terminated unexpectedly with a segmentation fault. The operf utility has been fixed to print an informative error message, and it no longer crashes in this scenario. (BZ#1073031)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• This update adds support for the 64-bit ARM architecture processor implementations to OProfile, namely Applied Micro X-Gene and ARM Cortex A57 processors. (BZ#963447)
• Support for the 5th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors has been added to OProfile. (BZ#1086836)
• This version of OProfile introduces support for IBM POWER8 systems.

(BZ#1088558)

• Support for Intel® Atom™ processors has been added to OProfile. (BZ#1129875)

Users of oprofile are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

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 for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.3 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 - AUS 7.3 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 IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.3 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 Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.3 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 7 x86_64
• 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 7.3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 7 s390x
• 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 EUS Compute Node 7.3 x86_64
• 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 for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support for IBM Power, big endian 7 ppc64

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)