RHSA-2014:1281 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated kernel packages that fix one security issue and several bugs are
now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security
impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which
gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the
References section.

Description

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux
operating system.

• An out-of-bounds memory access flaw was found in the Linux kernel's

system call auditing implementation. On a system with existing audit rules
defined, a local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to leak kernel
memory to user space or, potentially, crash the system. (CVE-2014-3917,
Moderate)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• A bug in the mtip32xx driver could prevent the Micron P420m PCIe SSD

devices with unaligned I/O access from completing the submitted I/O
requests. This resulted in a livelock situation and rendered the Micron
P420m PCIe SSD devices unusable. To fix this problem, mtip32xx now checks
whether an I/O access is unaligned and if so, it uses the correct
semaphore. (BZ#1125776)

• A series of patches has been backported to improve the functionality of

a touch pad on the latest Lenovo laptops in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
(BZ#1122559)

• Due to a bug in the bnx2x driver, a network adapter could be unable to

recover from EEH error injection. The network adapter had to be taken
offline and rebooted in order to function properly again. With this update,
the bnx2x driver has been corrected and network adapters now recover from
EEH errors as expected. (BZ#1107722)

• Previously, if an hrtimer interrupt was delayed, all future pending

hrtimer events that were queued on the same processor were also delayed
until the initial hrtimer event was handled. This could cause all hrtimer
processing to stop for a significant period of time. To prevent this
problem, the kernel has been modified to handle all expired hrtimer events
when handling the initially delayed hrtimer event. (BZ#1113175)

• A previous change to the nouveau driver introduced a bit shift error,

which resulted in a wrong display resolution being set with some models
of NVIDIA controllers. With this update, the erroneous code has been
corrected, and the affected NVIDIA controllers can now set the correct
display resolution. (BZ#1114869)

• Due to a NULL pointer dereference bug in the be2net driver, the system

could experience a kernel oops and reboot when disabling a network adapter
after a permanent failure. This problem has been fixed by introducing a
flag to keep track of the setup state. The failing adapter can now be
disabled successfully without a kernel crash. (BZ#1122558)

• Previously, the Huge Translation Lookaside Buffer (HugeTLB) allowed

access to huge pages access by default. However, huge pages may be
unsupported in some environments, such as a KVM guest on a PowerPC
architecture, and an attempt to access a huge page in memory would result
in a kernel oops. This update ensures that HugeTLB denies access to huge
pages if the huge pages are not supported on the system. (BZ#1122115)

• If an NVMe device becomes ready but fails to create I/O queues, the nvme

driver creates a character device handle to manage such a device.
Previously, a character device could be created before a device reference
counter was initialized, which resulted in a kernel oops. This problem has
been fixed by calling the relevant initialization function earlier in the
code. (BZ#1119720)

• On some firmware versions of the BladeEngine 3 (BE3) controller,

interrupts remain disabled after a hardware reset. This was a problem for
all Emulex-based network adapters using such a BE3 controller because
these adapters would fail to recover from an EEH error if it occurred. To
resolve this problem, the be2net driver has been modified to enable the
interrupts in the eeh_resume handler explicitly. (BZ#1121712)

All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be
rebooted for this update to take effect.

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
https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

To install kernel packages manually, use "rpm -ivh [package]". Do not use
"rpm -Uvh" as that will remove the running kernel binaries from your
system. You may use "rpm -e" to remove old kernels after determining that
the new kernel functions properly on your system.

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 from RHUI 7 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 - 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

• BZ - 1102571 - CVE-2014-3917 kernel: DoS with syscall auditing

CVEs

• CVE-2014-3917

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate