The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. This update fixes the following security issues: * multiple, missing initialization flaws were found in the Linux kernel. Padding data in several core network structures was not initialized properly before being sent to user-space. These flaws could lead to information leaks. This update also fixes the following bugs: * a packet duplication issue was fixed via the RHSA-2008:0665 update; however, the fix introduced a problem for systems using network bonding: Backup slaves were unable to receive ARP packets. When using network bonding in the "active-backup" mode and with the "arp_validate=3" option, the bonding driver considered such backup slaves as being down , preventing successful failover to these devices. * due to insufficient memory barriers in the network code, a process sleeping in select may have missed notifications about new data. In rare cases, this bug may have caused a process to sleep forever. * the driver version number in the ata_piix driver was not changed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8, even though changes had been made between these releases. This could have prevented the driver from loading on systems that check driver versions, as this driver appeared older than it was. * a bug in nlm_lookup_host could have led to un-reclaimed locks on file systems, resulting in the umount command failing. This bug could have also prevented NFS services from being relocated correctly in clustered environments. * the data buffer ethtool_get_strings allocated, for the igb driver, was smaller than the amount of data that was copied in igb_get_strings, because of a miscalculation in IGB_QUEUE_STATS_LEN, resulting in memory corruption. This bug could have led to a kernel panic. * in some situations, write operations to a TTY device were blocked even when the O_NONBLOCK flag was used. A reported case of this issue occurred when a single TTY device was opened by two users . * a deadlock was found in the cciss driver. In rare cases, this caused an NMI lockup during boot. Messages such as "cciss: controller cciss[x] failed, stopping." and "cciss[x]: controller not responding." may have been displayed on the console. * on 64-bit PowerPC systems, a rollover bug in the ibmveth driver could have caused a kernel panic. In a reported case, this panic occurred on a system with a large uptime and under heavy network load. 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.