RHEA-2018:2903 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

New kmod-oracleasm package is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

Oracle Automated Storage Management (ASM) is a data volume manager for Oracle databases. ASMLib is an optional utility that can be used on Linux systems to manage Oracle ASM devices. ASMLib consists of the following components:

• kmod-oracleasm (an open-source (GPL) kernel module package)
• oracleasm-support (an open-source (GPL) utilities package)
• oracleasmlib (a proprietary library package)

ASM features and functionality are available without ASMLib. In addition, the use of ASMLib does not affect database performance.

This enhancement update provides the kmod-oracleasm package with "Retpolines" code sequences to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. (BZ#1630539)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 customers who use ASMLib can obtain the other two
components, oracleasmlib and oracleasm-support, using the instructions here:

https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/315643

Note that Red Hat is continuing to develop fully open-source alternatives
to ASMLib. Red Hat has provided a reference architecture for Oracle Real
Application Clusters (RAC) using upstream-accepted technologies such as the
dm-multipath utility and the udev utility. This reference architecture is
available at:

https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/216093

Additional information regarding side-channel CPU cache timing attack
mitigation in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available at:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3311301#retpoline-kernels-2

All users who require kmod-oracleasm are advised to install these new packages.

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 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1630539 - Provide the Oracle ASMlib kernel module compiled for retpoline on 6.10

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)