The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. * An out-of-bounds memory access flaw was found in the Linux kernel"s system call auditing implementation. On a system with existing audit rules defined, a local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to leak kernel memory to user space or, potentially, crash the system. This update also fixes the following bugs: * A bug in the mtip32xx driver could prevent the Micron P420m PCIe SSD devices with unaligned I/O access from completing the submitted I/O requests. This resulted in a livelock situation and rendered the Micron P420m PCIe SSD devices unusable. To fix this problem, mtip32xx now checks whether an I/O access is unaligned and if so, it uses the correct semaphore. * A series of patches has been backported to improve the functionality of a touch pad on the latest Lenovo laptops in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. * Due to a bug in the bnx2x driver, a network adapter could be unable to recover from EEH error injection. The network adapter had to be taken offline and rebooted in order to function properly again. With this update, the bnx2x driver has been corrected and network adapters now recover from EEH errors as expected. * Previously, if an hrtimer interrupt was delayed, all future pending hrtimer events that were queued on the same processor were also delayed until the initial hrtimer event was handled. This could cause all hrtimer processing to stop for a significant period of time. To prevent this problem, the kernel has been modified to handle all expired hrtimer events when handling the initially delayed hrtimer event. * A previous change to the nouveau driver introduced a bit shift error, which resulted in a wrong display resolution being set with some models of NVIDIA controllers. With this update, the erroneous code has been corrected, and the affected NVIDIA controllers can now set the correct display resolution. * Due to a NULL pointer dereference bug in the be2net driver, the system could experience a kernel oops and reboot when disabling a network adapter after a permanent failure. This problem has been fixed by introducing a flag to keep track of the setup state. The failing adapter can now be disabled successfully without a kernel crash. * Previously, the Huge Translation Lookaside Buffer allowed access to huge pages access by default. However, huge pages may be unsupported in some environments, such as a KVM guest on a PowerPC architecture, and an attempt to access a huge page in memory would result in a kernel oops. This update ensures that HugeTLB denies access to huge pages if the huge pages are not supported on the system. * If an NVMe device becomes ready but fails to create I/O queues, the nvme driver creates a character device handle to manage such a device. Previously, a character device could be created before a device reference counter was initialized, which resulted in a kernel oops. This problem has been fixed by calling the relevant initialization function earlier in the code. * On some firmware versions of the BladeEngine 3 controller, interrupts remain disabled after a hardware reset. This was a problem for all Emulex-based network adapters using such a BE3 controller because these adapters would fail to recover from an EEH error if it occurred. To resolve this problem, the be2net driver has been modified to enable the interrupts in the eeh_resume handler explicitly. All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.