kernel-2.6.18-371.5.AXS3

The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device input and output, etc.

Security issues fixed with this release:

CVE-2014-2678
The rds_iw_laddr_check function in net/rds/iw.c in the Linux kernel through 3.14 allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a bind system call for an RDS socket on a system that lacks RDS transports.

CVE-2014-4021
Xen 3.2.x through 4.4.x does not properly clean memory pages recovered from guests, which allows local guest OS users to obtain sensitive information via unspecified vectors.

fixed bugs;

* A bug in the journaling block device (jbd and jbd2) code could, under certain circumstances, trigger a BUG_ON() assertion and result in a kernel oops. This happened when an application performed an extensive number of commits to the journal of the ext3 file system and there was no currently active transaction while synchronizing the file's in-core state. and fixed it.

* After a statically defined gateway became unreachable and its corresponding neighbor entry entered a FAILED state, the gateway stayed in the FAILED state even after it became reachable again. So, traffic was not routed through that gateway. and fixed it.

* Due to an incorrect condition check in the IPv6 code, the ipv6 driver was unable to correctly assemble incoming packet fragments, which resulted in a high IPv6 packet loss rate. and fixed it.

* A kernel panic could be triggered when a directory was being removed while a concurrent cross-directory operation was performed on this directory on another cluster node. with this update, it avoids the kernel panic in this situation by correcting the search logic in the d_splice_alias() function so that the function can no longer return a dentry from an incorrect directory.

* Previously, the NFSv4 server did not handle multiple OPEN operations to the same file separately, which could cause the NFSv4 client to repeatedly send CLOSE requests with the same state ID, even though the NFS server rejected the request with an NFS4ERR_OLD_STATEID (10024) error code. with this update, it ensures that the NFSv4 client no longer re-sends the same CLOSE request after receiving NFS4ERR_OLD_STATEID.