Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 RHSA-2009:0014-01 Important Local DoS Fix

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
This update addresses the following security issues:
* the sendmsg() function in the Linux kernel did not block during UNIX socket garbage collection. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service. (CVE-2008-5300, Important)
* when fput() was called to close a socket, the __scm_destroy() function in the Linux kernel could make indirect recursive calls to itself. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service. (CVE-2008-5029, Important)
* a deficiency was found in the Linux kernel virtual file system (VFS) implementation. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to make a series of file creations within deleted directories, possibly causing a denial of service. (CVE-2008-3275, Moderate)
* a buffer underflow flaw was found in the Linux kernel IB700 SBC watchdog timer driver. This deficiency could lead to a possible information leak. By default, the "/dev/watchdog" device is accessible only to the root user. (CVE-2008-5702, Low)
* the hfs and hfsplus file systems code failed to properly handle corrupted data structures. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service. (CVE-2008-4933, CVE-2008-5025, Low)
* a flaw was found in the hfsplus file system implementation. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service when write operations were performed. (CVE-2008-4934, Low)
This update also fixes the following bugs:
* when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 and 4.7 on some systems running Intel® CPUs, the cpuspeed daemon did not run, preventing the CPU speed from being changed, such as not being reduced to an idle state when not in use.
* mmap() could be used to gain access to beyond the first megabyte of RAM, due to insufficient checks in the Linux kernel code. Checks have been added to prevent this.
* attempting to turn keyboard LEDs on and off rapidly on keyboards with slow keyboard controllers, may have caused key presses to fail.
* after migrating a hypervisor guest, the MAC address table was not updated, causing packet loss and preventing network connections to the guest. Now, a gratuitous ARP request is sent after migration. This refreshes the ARP caches, minimizing network downtime.
* writing crash dumps with diskdump may have caused a kernel panic on Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems with certain memory configurations.
* on big-endian systems, such as PowerPC, the getsockopt() function incorrectly returned 0 depending on the parameters passed to it when the time to live (TTL) value equaled 255, possibly causing memory corruption and application crashes.
* a problem in the kernel packages provided by the RHSA-2008:0508 advisory caused the Linux kernel's built-in memory copy procedure to return the wrong error code after recovering from a page fault on AMD64 and Intel 64 systems. This may have caused other Linux kernel functions to return wrong error codes.
* a divide-by-zero bug in the Linux kernel process scheduler, which may have caused kernel panics on certain systems, has been resolved.
* the netconsole kernel module caused the Linux kernel to hang when slave interfaces of bonded network interfaces were started, resulting in a system hang or kernel panic when restarting the network.
* the "/proc/xen/" directory existed even if systems were not running Red Hat Virtualization. This may have caused problems for third-party software that checks virtualization-ability based on the existence of "/proc/xen/". Note: this update will remove the "/proc/xen/" directory on systems not running Red Hat Virtualization.
All Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues.