The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. Security fixes: * memory leaks were found on some error paths in the icmp_send function in the Linux kernel. This could, potentially, cause the network connectivity to cease. * Chris Evans reported a deficiency in the clone system call when called with the CLONE_PARENT flag. This flaw permits the caller to indicate an arbitrary signal it wants to receive when its child process exits. This could lead to a denial of service of the parent process. * an off-by-one underflow flaw was found in the eCryptfs subsystem. This could potentially cause a local denial of service when the readlink function returned an error. * a deficiency was found in the Remote BIOS Update driver for Dell systems. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to cause a denial of service by reading zero bytes from the image_type or packet_size files in "/sys/devices/platform/dell_rbu/". * an inverted logic flaw was found in the SysKonnect FDDI PCI adapter driver, allowing driver statistics to be reset only when the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability was absent . * the sock_getsockopt function in the Linux kernel did not properly initialize a data structure that can be directly returned to user-space when the getsockopt function is called with SO_BSDCOMPAT optname set. This flaw could possibly lead to memory disclosure. * the ext2 and ext3 file system code failed to properly handle corrupted data structures, leading to a possible local denial of service when read or write operations were performed on a specially-crafted file system. * a deficiency was found in the libATA implementation. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service. Note: by default, the "/dev/sg*" devices are accessible only to the root user. Bug fixes: * a bug in aic94xx may have caused kernel panics during boot on some systems with certain SATA disks. * a word endianness problem in the qla2xx driver on PowerPC-based machines may have corrupted flash-based devices. * a memory leak in pipe may have caused a system deadlock. The workaround in Section 1.5, Known Issues, of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Release Notes Updates, which involved manually allocating extra file descriptors to processes calling do_pipe, is no longer necessary. * CPU soft-lockups in the network rate estimator. * bugs in the ixgbe driver caused it to function unreliably on some systems with 16 or more CPU cores. * the iwl4965 driver may have caused a kernel panic. * a bug caused NFS attributes to not update for some long-lived NFS mounted file systems. * unmounting a GFS2 file system may have caused a panic. * a bug in ptrace may have caused a panic when single stepping a target. * on some 64-bit systems, notsc was incorrectly set at boot, causing slow gettimeofday calls. * do_machine_check cleared all Machine Check Exception status registers, preventing the BIOS from using them to determine the cause of certain panics and errors. * scaling problems caused performance problems for LAPI applications. * a panic may have occurred on systems using certain Intel WiFi Link 5000 products when booting with the RF Kill switch on. * the TSC is invariant with C/P/T states, and always runs at constant frequency from now on. All 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.