Security update for Linux kernel

Knowledgebase

(Last modified: 31JAN2005)

solutions Security update for Linux kernel SuSE Linux Maintenance Web (d315ec2077afa56ee713a6cf932817ab)

Applies to

Package: kernel-s390x
kernel-source
kernel-syms
Product(s): SUSE CORE 9 for IBM zSeries 64bit
Patch: patch-9824
Release: 20050131
Obsoletes: 2cdf5f33e45465d694a68fce9332931c
771b803774269f9dfcfa618ed1362f21
85e05760b3103f0f201e798508c3e7cb

Indications

Everyone using the Linux Kernel should update.

Contraindications

None.

Problem description

This update fixes following security problems:

An NFS Direct I/O local denial of service could allow a local attacker to crash the machine.
A previous smbfs security fix was faulty, writes did no longer work on smbfs shares.
Unsigned vs signed problems in the generic scsi ioctl handler were reported by grsecurity. They have no impact due to the compiler using unsigned arithmetic, but are fixed nevertheless.
ppos /proc file race conditions in the mapped_base and oom_adjust proc files were fixed.

Following non security bugs were fixed:

A bug in the pciconfig sysfs interface could cause incorrect values to be read from and written to PCI config space.
A locking problem in CKRM could lead to a crash.
In low memory situations, large writes would not be serviced in a timely fashion.
The initialization of the bio->bi_bdev field was incorrect.
VFS callouts for flock were added.
MD on top of Device Mapper based devices was not working and lead to kernel crashes.
Non-fatal errors encountered during readahead operations caused the device mapper multipath to fail the hardware path.
A race condition in the kernel timer code could lead to kernel crashes under high load.
An inetaddr notification problem with SCTP could lead to machine crashes.
Lots of bugs and problems were fixed in the NSS Netware Storage System module.
Several bugs in the DRBD device driver were fixed.

Following bug update for s390 architecture:

Patches updated to IBM Codedrop 2005-01-24
The XFS module could not be loaded.

Solution

Please install the updates provided at the location noted below.

Installation notes

This update is provided as an RPM package that can easily be installed onto a running system by using this command:
rpm -Fvh kernel-s390x.rpm kernel-source.rpm kernel-syms.rpm zipl
Finally, reboot the system with
shutdown -r now
to load the new kernel (replace "now" with the appropriate amount of time to allow local users to cleanly log out, for example "+5" for five minutes.)

links to download packages

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for IBM zSeries 64bit (s390x)

Download Source Packages

Download the source code of the patches for maintained products.

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