Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4: RHSA-2009:1211-01 Important Kernel Fixes

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
These updated packages fix the following security issues:
* Michael Tokarev reported a flaw in the Realtek r8169 Ethernet driver in the Linux kernel. This driver allowed interfaces using this driver to receive frames larger than what could be handled. This could lead to a remote denial of service or code execution. (CVE-2009-1389, Important)
* a buffer overflow flaw was found in the CIFSTCon() function of the Linux kernel Common Internet File System (CIFS) implementation. When mounting a CIFS share, a malicious server could send an overly-long string to the client, possibly leading to a denial of service or privilege escalation on the client mounting the CIFS share. (CVE-2009-1439, Important)
* several flaws were found in the way the Linux kernel CIFS implementation handles Unicode strings. CIFS clients convert Unicode strings sent by a server to their local character sets, and then write those strings into memory. If a malicious server sent a long enough string, it could write past the end of the target memory region and corrupt other memory areas, possibly leading to a denial of service or privilege escalation on the client mounting the CIFS share. (CVE-2009-1633, Important)
These updated packages also fix the following bugs:
* when using network bonding in the "balance-tlb" or "balance-alb" mode, the primary setting for the primary slave device was lost when said device was brought down (ifdown). Bringing the slave interface back up (ifup) did not restore the primary setting (the device was not made the active slave). (BZ#507563)
* a bug in timer_interrupt() may have caused the system time to move up to two days or more into the future, or to be delayed for several minutes. This bug only affected Intel 64 and AMD64 systems that have the High Precision Event Timer (HPET) enabled in the BIOS, and could have caused problems for applications that require timing to be accurate. (BZ#508835)
* a race condition was resolved in the Linux kernel block layer between show_partition() and rescan_partitions(). This could have caused a NULL pointer dereference in show_partition(), leading to a system crash (kernel panic). This issue was most likely to occur on systems running monitoring software that regularly scanned hard disk partitions, or from repeatedly running commands that probe for partition information. (BZ#512310)
* previously, the Stratus memory tracker missed certain modified pages. With this update, information about the type of page (small page or huge page) is passed to the Stratus memory tracker, which resolves this issue. The fix for this issue does not affect systems that do not use memory tracking. (BZ#513182)
* a bug may have caused a system crash when using the cciss driver, due to an uninitialized kernel structure. A reported case of this issue occurred after issuing consecutive SCSI TUR commands (sg_turs sends SCSI test-unit-ready commands in a loop). (BZ#513189)
* a bug in the SCSI implementation caused "Aborted Command - internal target failure" errors to be sent to Device-Mapper Multipath, without retries, resulting in Device-Mapper Multipath marking the path as failed and making a path group switch. With this update, all errors that return a sense key in the SCSI mid layer (including "Aborted Command - internal target failure") are retried. (BZ#514007)
Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.