Red Hat 5.3: RHSA-2010:0660-01 Critical: Stack Overflow Threats

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
This update fixes the following security issues:
* when an application has a stack overflow, the stack could silently overwrite another memory mapped area instead of a segmentation fault occurring, which could cause an application to execute arbitrary code, possibly leading to privilege escalation. It is known that the X Window System server can be used to trigger this flaw. (CVE-2010-2240, Important)
* a miscalculation of the size of the free space of the initial directory entry in a directory leaf block was found in the Linux kernel Global File System 2 (GFS2) implementation. A local, unprivileged user with write access to a GFS2-mounted file system could perform a rename operation on that file system to trigger a NULL pointer dereference, possibly resulting in a denial of service or privilege escalation. (CVE-2010-2798, Important)
Red Hat would like to thank the X.Org security team for reporting CVE-2010-2240, with upstream acknowledging Rafal Wojtczuk as the original reporter; and Grant Diffey of CenITex for reporting CVE-2010-2798.
This update also fixes the following bugs:
* the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 General Availability (GA) release introduced a regression in iSCSI failover time. While there was heavy I/O on the iSCSI layer, attempting to log out of an iSCSI connection at the same time a network problem was occurring, such as a switch dying or a cable being pulled out, resulted in iSCSI failover taking several minutes. With this update, failover occurs as expected. (BZ#583898)
* a bug was found in the way the megaraid_sas driver (for SAS based RAID controllers) handled physical disks and management IOCTLs. All physical disks were exported to the disk layer, allowing an oops in megasas_complete_cmd_dpc() when completing the IOCTL command if a timeout occurred. One possible trigger for this bug was running "mkfs". This update resolves this issue by updating the megaraid_sas driver to version 4.31. (BZ#619362)
* this update upgrades the bnx2x driver to version 1.52.1-6, and the bnx2x firmware to version 1.52.1-6, incorporating multiple bug fixes and enhancements. These fixes include: A race condition on systems using the bnx2x driver due to multiqueue being used to transmit data, but only a single queue transmit ON/OFF scheme being used (only a single queue is used with this update); a bug that could have led to a kernel panic when using iSCSI offload; and a bug that caused a firmware crash, causing network devices using the bnx2x driver to lose network connectivity. When this firmware crash occurred, errors such as "timeout polling for state" and "Stop leading failed!" were logged. A system reboot was required to restore network connectivity. (BZ#620663, BZ#620668, BZ#620669, BZ#620665)
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.