Issued:
2009-12-23
Updated:
2009-12-23

RHSA-2009:1692 - Important: rhev-hypervisor security and bug fix update

Synopsis

Important: rhev-hypervisor security and bug fix update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory Important

Topic

An updated rhev-hypervisor package that fixes security issues and several bugs is now available.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

Description

The rhev-hypervisor package provides a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) Hypervisor ISO disk image. The RHEV Hypervisor is a dedicated Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. It includes everything necessary to run and manage virtual machines: A subset of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating environment and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Agent.

Note: RHEV Hypervisor is only available for the Intel 64 and AMD64 architectures with virtualization extensions.

A flaw was found in the Realtek r8169 Ethernet driver in the Linux kernel. pci_unmap_single() presented a memory leak that could lead to IOMMU space exhaustion and a system crash. An attacker on the local network could trigger this flaw by using jumbo frames for large amounts of network traffic. (CVE-2009-3613)

On x86 platforms, the do_insn_fetch() function did not limit the amount of instruction bytes fetched per instruction. Users in guest operating systems could leverage this flaw to cause large latencies on SMP hosts that could lead to a local denial of service on the host operating system. This update fixes this issue by imposing the architecturally-defined 15 byte length limit for instructions. (CVE-2009-4031)

This updated package provides updated components that include fixes for security issues; however, these issues have no security impact for RHEV Hypervisor. These fixes are for kernel issues CVE-2009-2695, CVE-2009-2908, CVE-2009-3228, CVE-2009-3286, CVE-2009-3547, CVE-2009-3612, CVE-2009-3620, CVE-2009-3621, and CVE-2009-3726; acpid issue CVE-2009-4033; expat issues CVE-2009-3560 and CVE-2009-3720; and wget issue CVE-2009-3490.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

  • the scsi_dh_rdac driver was updated to recognize the Sun StorageTek Flexline 380. This driver is now also loaded into initrd to handle passive paths correctly. Without this initrd change, lots of errors could occur during boot, increasing boot time. (BZ#545909)

  • during the firstboot network configuration of the RHEV Hypervisor, it was only possible to specify NTP servers by their IP addresses if the RHEV Hypervisor system was configured with a static IP address. With this update, hostnames can also be used to specify NTP servers. (BZ#545923)

  • with the default settings, performance problems occurred when using the qcow2 image format. This could cause guest operating system installations to take hours. With this update, performance patches have been backported to resolve this issue. (BZ#520693)

  • when using the virtual vm8086 mode, bugs in the emulated hardware task switching implementation may have, in some situations, caused older guest operating systems to malfunction. (BZ#532031)

  • Windows Server 2003 guests (32-bit) with more than 4GB of memory may have crashed during reboot when using the default RHEV Hypervisor settings. (BZ#532043)

  • guests continued to run after encountering disk read errors. This could have led to their file systems becoming corrupted (but not the host's), notably in environments that use networked storage. With this update, guests will now pause on disk read and write errors. (BZ#537334, BZ#540406)

  • the para-virtualized block driver (virtio-blk) silently ignored read errors when accessing disk images. With this update, the driver correctly signals the read error to the guest. (BZ#537334)

Users of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which corrects these issues.

Solution

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

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at This content is not included.http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Virtualization5x86_64

Updated Packages

  • rhev-hypervisor-pxe-5.4-2.1.3.el5_4rhev2_1.noarch.rpm
  • rhev-hypervisor-5.4-2.1.3.el5_4rhev2_1.noarch.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

References

Additional information