The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. This update fixes the following security issues: * A use-after-free flaw was found in the madvise system call implementation in the Linux kernel. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to cause a denial of service or, potentially, escalate their privileges. * A flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel"s TCP/IP protocol suite implementation handled IPv6 sockets that used the UDP_CORK option. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to cause a denial of service. * An information leak flaw in the Linux kernel could allow a local, unprivileged user to leak kernel memory to user-space. Red Hat would like to thank Hannes Frederic Sowa for reporting CVE-2013-4162. This update also fixes the following bugs: * A bug in the be2net driver prevented communication between NICs using be2net. This update applies a patch addressing this problem along with several other upstream patches that fix various other problems. Traffic between NICs using the be2net driver now proceeds as expected. * A recent patch fixing a problem that prevented communication between NICs using the be2net driver caused the firmware of NICs to become unresponsive, and thus triggered a kernel panic. The problem was caused by unnecessary usage of a hardware workaround that allows skipping VLAN tag insertion. A patch has been applied and the workaround is now used only when the multi-channel configuration is enabled on the NIC. Note that the bug only affected the NICs with firmware version 4.2.xxxx. * A bug in the autofs4 mount expiration code could cause the autofs4 module to falsely report a busy tree of NFS mounts as "not in use". Consequently, automount attempted to unmount the tree and failed with a "failed to umount offset" error, leaving the mount tree to appear as empty directories. A patch has been applied to remove an incorrectly used autofs dentry mount check and the aforementioned problem no longer occurs. * A race condition in the be_open function in the be2net driver could trigger the BUG_ON macro, which resulted in a kernel panic. A patch addressing this problem has been applied and the race condition is now avoided by enabling polling before enabling interrupts globally. The kernel no longer panics in this situation. 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.