The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. Security fix: * The fix for CVE-2011-1083 introduced a flaw in the way the Linux kernel"s Event Poll subsystem handled resource clean up when an ELOOP error code was returned. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to cause a denial of service. Bug fixes: * The qla2xxx driver handled interrupts for QLogic Fibre Channel adapters incorrectly due to a bug in a test condition for MSI-X support. This update corrects the bug and qla2xxx now handles interrupts as expected. * A process scheduler did not handle RPC priority wait queues correctly. Consequently, the process scheduler failed to wake up all scheduled tasks as expected after RPC timeout, which caused the system to become unresponsive and could significantly decrease system performance. This update modifies the process scheduler to handle RPC priority wait queues as expected. All scheduled tasks are now properly woken up after RPC timeout and the system behaves as expected. * The kernel version 2.6.18-308.4.1.el5 contained several bugs which led to an overrun of the NFS server page array. Consequently, any attempt to connect an NFS client running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 to the NFS server running on the system with this kernel caused the NFS server to terminate unexpectedly and the kernel to panic. This update corrects the bugs causing NFS page array overruns and the kernel no longer crashes in this scenario. * An insufficiently designed calculation in the CPU accelerator in the previous kernel caused an arithmetic overflow in the sched_clock function when system uptime exceeded 208.5 days. This overflow led to a kernel panic on the systems using the Time Stamp Counter or Virtual Machine Interface clock source. This update corrects the calculation so that this arithmetic overflow and kernel panic can no longer occur under these circumstances. Note: This advisory does not include a fix for this bug for the 32-bit architecture. * Under memory pressure, memory pages that are still a part of a checkpointing transaction can be invalidated. However, when the pages were invalidated, the journal head was re-filed onto the transactions" "forget" list, which caused the current running transaction"s block to be modified. As a result, block accounting was not properly performed on that modified block because it appeared to have already been modified due to the journal head being re-filed. This could trigger an assertion failure in the "journal_commit_transaction" function on the system. The "b_modified" flag is now cleared before the journal head is filed onto any transaction; assertion failures no longer occur. * When running more than 30 instances of the cclengine utility concurrently on IBM System z with IBM Communications Controller for Linux, the system could become unresponsive. This was caused by a missing wake_up function call in the qeth_release_buffer function in the QETH network device driver. This update adds the missing wake_up function call and the system now responds as expected in this scenario. * Recent changes removing support for the Flow Director from the ixgbe driver introduced bugs that caused the RSS functionality to stop working correctly on Intel 82599EB 10 Gigabit Ethernet network devices. This update corrects the return code in the ixgbe_cache_ring_fdir function and setting of the registers that control the RSS redirection table. Also, obsolete code related to Flow Director support has been removed. The RSS functionality now works as expected on these devices. 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.