Issued:

2013-02-20

Updated:

2013-02-20

RHBA-2013:0386 - tuned bug fix update

Synopsis

tuned bug fix update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory (none)

Topic

Updated tuned packages that fix several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The tuned packages contain a daemon that tunes system settings dynamically. It does so by monitoring the usage of several system components periodically.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and later enters processor power-saving states more aggressively. This could result in a small performance penalty on certain workloads. With this update, the pmqos-static.py daemon has been added to the tuned packages, which allows to set the requested latency using the kernel Power Management QoS interface. It is run when the "latency-performance" profile is activated and it sets cpu_dma_latency=0, which keeps the CPU in C0 state, thus making the system as responsive as possible. (BZ#714180)

• When the ELEVATOR_TUNE_DEVS option was set to a disk device in the /etc/sysconfig/ktune file instead of providing a disk scheduler control file, the scheduler setting was not written to a disk scheduler control file but directly into the disk device file. Consequently, contents of the disk could become corrupted. With this update, the value of ELEVATOR_TUNE_DEVS is checked and only the disk scheduler control file is allowed for writing. As a result, an invalid value of ELEVATOR_TUNE_DEVS is detected in the described scenario so that the disk contents damage can be prevented. (BZ#784308)

• When the tuned daemon run with the "enterprise-storage" profile enabled and a non-root, non-boot disk partition from a device with write-back cache was mounted, tuned remounted the partition with the "nobarriers" option. If a power failure occurred at that time, the file system could become corrupted. With this update, tuned can detect usage of write-back cache on devices communicating with kernel via SCSI. In these cases, "nobarriers" is now disabled, thus preventing this bug in the described scenario. (BZ#801561)

• Previously, when the tuned service was started, the tuned PID file was created with world-writable permissions. This bug has been fixed and the /var/run/tuned/tuned.pid file is now created with correct permissions as expected. (BZ#845336)

• On a machine with hot-plug disk devices with the "enterprise-storage" profile activated, a new disk device could be added into the system, or the disk could be removed and inserted back. In such a scenario, the scheduler and read-ahead settings from the profile were not applied on the newly-added disks. With this update, a new udev rule has been added, which restarts the ktune daemon whenever a new disk device is added, thus fixing this bug. (BZ#847445)

• The transparent hugepage kernel thread could interfere with latency-sensitive applications. To lower the latency, the transparent hugepages are now disabled in the latency-performance tuned profile. (BZ#887355)

• Previously, non-root, non-boot partitions were re-mounted using the "nobarrier" option to improve performance. On virtual guests, this could lead to data corruption if power supply was suddenly interrupted, because there was usually a host cache in transfer. This bug has been fixed and the virtual-guest profile no longer re-mounts partitions using "nobarrier". (BZ#886956)

Users of tuned are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• tuned-0.2.19-11.el6.noarch.rpm
• tuned-utils-0.2.19-11.el6.noarch.rpm
• tuned-0.2.19-11.el6.src.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 784308
• This content is not included.BZ - 801561
• This content is not included.BZ - 845336
• This content is not included.BZ - 887355

CVEs

• CVE-2012-6136

References

(none)

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.