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Introduction

Red Hat Enterprise Linux minor releases are an aggregation of individual
enhancement, security and bug fix errata. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9
Release Notes documents the major changes made to the Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 4 operating system and its accompanying applications for this minor
release.

Detailed information on the changes that each updated package provides is
available in the [2]Errata Documentation for each package.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Lifecycle. Red Hat is releasing the 9th minor
release update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. This update transitions Red
Hat Enterprise Linux to the Production III life cycle phase. This update
is being released as an online only update on Red Hat Network. No new
media kits are being issued. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is now closed for
new feature requests and new hardware enablement. Red Hat will continue to
deliver security and bug fixes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 until the
End-of-Life scheduled for February 29, 2012. Customers requiring longer
life cycle support should contact Red Hat or its support partners for
Extended Life Cycle phase support programs.

Installation

Installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 is completed by upgrading
from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8. To update a Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4.8 installation, first ensure that the system is subscribed to the 4.9
channel, then use the up2date command:

up2date --update

Important

Before upgrading, ensure that the system has the most recent version of
the up2date tool installed by running the command up2date up2date

There is no media kit available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9.

Driver Updates

The kernel-utils package provides microcode_ctl utility code and the
microcode data itself — supplied by Intel — to assist the kernel in
updating the CPU microcode at system boot time. This microcode supports
all current Intel x86- and Intel 64-based CPU models and takes advantage
of the mechanism built-in to Linux that allows microcode to be updated
after system boot. When loaded, the updated microcode corrects the
behavior of various Intel processors, as described in processor
specification updates issued by Intel for those processors. In the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4.9 release the kernel-utils package has been updated
with the 2010-09-14 version of Intel's microcode.

General Updates

Intel Xeon support in OProfile. OProfile is a system-wide Linux
profiler, capable of running at low overhead. It consists of a kernel
driver and a daemon for collecting raw sample data, along with a suite of
tools for parsing that data into meaningful information. OProfile is
generally used by developers to determine which sections of code consume
the most amount of CPU time, and why.

OProfile in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 now supports Intel Xeon (formerly
codenamed Nehalem) processor performance events.

Improved Checksum support in coreutils. Newer Red Hat disk images use
the SHA-256 algorithm as the checksum method. Previously, verifying these
checksums on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was not a simple process. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4.9 provides and updated coreutils updated package,
containing checksum utilities for the whole SHA-2 family, allowing a user
to easily count or verify SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
checksums.

KornShell. KSH-93 is the most recent version of the KornShell (ksh) by
David Korn of AT&T Bell Laboratories, a shell programming language
upwards-compatible with sh (the Bourne Shell). In Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4.9, ksh is updated to the upstream release version ksh93t+.

Firefox. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 features version 3.6.4 of the
Mozilla Firefox open source web browser. Refer to the [3]Firefox 3.6
Release Notes and [4]Firefox 3.6.4 Release Notes for further details on
the bug fixes and enhancements provided by this update.

SystemTap. SystemTap is a tracing and probing tool that allows users to
study and monitor the activities of the operating system (particularly,
the kernel) in fine detail. It provides information similar to the output
of tools like netstat, ps, top, and iostat; however, SystemTap is designed
to provide more filtering and analysis options for collected information.

SystemTap in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 has been updated to version 1.3.
Most notably, this update provides support for the newer kprobe
capabilities.

Technology Previews

Technology Preview features are currently not supported under Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4.9 subscription services, may not be functionally
complete, and are generally not suitable for production use. However,
these features are included as a customer convenience and to provide the
feature with wider exposure.

Customers may find these features useful in a non-production environment.
Customers are also free to provide feedback and functionality suggestions
for a technology preview feature before it becomes fully supported.
Erratas will be provided for high-severity security issues.

During the development of a technology preview feature, additional
components may become available to the public for testing. It is the
intention of Red Hat to fully support technology preview features in a
future release.

For more information on the scope of Technology Previews in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, please view the [5]Technology Preview Features Support
Scope page on the Red Hat website.

OpenOffice 2.0. OpenOffice 2.0 is now included in this release as a
Technology Preview. This suite features several improvements, including
ODF and PDF functionalities, support for digital signatures and greater
compatibility with open suites in terms of format and interface. In
addition to this, the OpenOffice 2.0 spreadsheet has enhanced pivot table
support, and can now handle up to 65,000 rows.

For more information about OpenOffice 2.0, please refer to
[6]http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/2.0/index.html .

Known Issues

Bugzilla #523255

When dm-multipath is used on a storage device that implements
ALUA, and group-by-prio is enabled, then the path groups are
established when the device is configured. The paths with the same
priority are grouped together, the group priority is calculated as
the sum of the path priorities, and the path group with the
highest sum is selected for I/O. If a path's priority changes, the
group priority is re-calculated, and the active path group may
change. The path grouping is not changed, even though some members
of the group may now have different priorities. If you wish to
re-establish the path grouping after a change, then you must enter
the command

multipathd -k"reconfigure"

Bugzilla #653424

When dm-multipath is used on a storage device that implements
ALUA, and group-by-prio is enabled, then the path groups are
established when the device is configured. The paths with the same
priority are grouped together, the group priority is calculated as
the sum of the path priorities, and the path group with the
highest sum is selected for I/O. If a path's priority changes, the
group priority is re-calculated, and the active path group may
change. The path grouping is not changed, even though some members
of the group may now have different priorities. If you wish to
re-establish the path grouping after a change, then you must enter
the command

multipathd -k"reconfigure"

Bugzilla #653424

Broken dependencies in the up2date-4.8.1-33.el4_8.9 package may
result in an update of the up2date package failing. Consequently,
if the up2date-4.8.1-33.el4_8.9, package is installed on a system
the new up2date package must be manually downloaded from the Red
Hat Network and installed using the rpm command.

[7]Bugzilla #459785

Japanese language JP106 keyboards will not function correctly when
booting into Rescue Mode on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9.

[8]Bugzilla #494022

Updating all packages from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 to Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4.9 on multilib architectures may fail with
dependency issues for the openmpi-libs package. To work around
this issue, use the following commands to update the compat-dapl
package before updating the remaining packages:

up2date compat-dapl
up2date -fu

[9]Bugzilla #443137

Some x86 64-bit systems may hang during boot when the noapic debug
kernel parameter is used.

Known Issue: [10]Bugzilla #499457

As a result of N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support added in
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 on s390x architectures, the
permanent_port_name sysfs attribute is no longer included. This
attribute was used (primarily for debugging purposes) to
differentiate the use of NPIV Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) from
within Linux. In the absence of this attribute, system
administrators should refer to the Hardware Management Console /
Support Element (HMC/SE) to find the virtual port address on an
NPIV-enabled system.

[11]Bugzilla #484117

The Logical Volume Manager in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 reports
file descriptor leaks, resulting in the following error returned
to the installation output:

File descriptor NUM (socket:XXXX) leaked on lvm invocation.

This message can be safely ignored.

[12]Bugzilla #468097

When installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 through an Network File
System (NFS) server, the installer is unable to correctly close
the NFS mount points. This might cause the NFS server to
misbehave. In these cases Red Hat suggests the use of an HTTP
server for installations.

[13]Bugzilla #468097

On systems where the BIOS is able to do both legacy (acpiphp) and
native (pciehp) PCI hotplugging, it is necessary for the
administrator to choose a preferred method and explicitly prevent
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 from loading the module for the
undesired method. This is done by blacklisting the undesired
module in /etc/modprobe.conf.

[14]Bugzilla #449648

Red Hat discourages the use of quota on EXT3 file systems. This is
because in some cases, doing so can cause a deadlock.

Testing has revealed that kjournald can sometimes block some
EXT3-specific callouts that are used when quota is running. As
such, Red Hat does not plan to fix this issue in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4, as the modifications required would be too
invasive.

Note that this issue is not present in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

[15]Bugzilla #452578

The Desktop Sharing connection icon displays its context menu when
you double-click it, not when you right-click it. All other icons
display their context menus when you right-click on them.

[16]Bugzilla #451873

If the ib_ehca InfiniBand driver is loaded in port auto-detection
mode (using module parameter nr_ports=-1), the IP-over-InfiniBand
network interfaces (ibX) might become available too late. When
this occurs, the ifup ibX command issued from the openibd startup
script will fail; consequently, the ibX interface will not become
available.

When this occurs, use the command rcnetwork restart to fix the
problem.

[17]Bugzilla #451873

In the [18]IBM Redbook "Implementing InfiniBand in IBM System p
(SG247351) manual, Table 6-3 (on page 220 of the PDF version)
describes debug code bit definitions, where several HCA error
indicator bits are also described.

Note that with eHCA2 adapters, bits 46 and 47 of these error
indicator bits might return false positives.

[19]Bugzilla #366961

On HP ICH10 workstations, audio is only enabled through the front
3.5mm jacks. As such, to receive any audio output or use
recording, you should plug in your headphones, speakers, or
microphones to the front jacks. At present, the rear jacks,
internal speaker, and master volume for this workstation do not
work.

[20]Bugzilla #429727

With this update, the default PCI detection and ordering mode for
the following models have changed:

o HP Proliant DL 580 G5

o HP Proliant DL 385 G2

o HP Proliant DL 585 G2

These models use a device scanning and enumeration mode which is
not the default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or 5. The mode used
by these HP Proliant models could result in add-on cards being
detected and added prior to onboard/internal devices. This
unexpected ordering could cause difficulties when installing new
instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, adding hardware, and
maintenance.

The numbering of network interface cards (NIC) for the
aforementioned HP Proliant models may change when they are updated
with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 kernel. The installer
changes NIC numbering if the HWADDR=MAC ADDRESS parameter is not
defined in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth[X] for each
installed NICs. As such, Red Hat recommends that you ensure this
parameter is defined in order to avoid any problems arising from
an unexpected NIC enumeration.

In addition, to avoid any NIC enumeration changes after updating
these HP Proliant models to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7, add the
kernel boot parameter pci=nobfsort to /boot/grub/grub.conf.

[21]Bugzilla #232499

When a volume group contains a mirror or snapshot, issuing the
lvchange command with a volume group parameter may result in the
following error messages:

Unable to change mirror log LV fail_secondary_mlog directly
Unable to change mirror image LV fail_secondary_mimage_0 directly
Unable to change mirror image LV fail_secondary_mimage_1 directly

These messages can be safely ignored.

[22]Bugzilla #441870

Dell PowerEdge SC1435s systems may hang during boot-up. To avoid
this, edit the terminal line in grub.conf and replace the string
serial console with console serial.

[23]Bugzilla #456533

The updated ixgbe driver does not support the Intel 82598AT
(Copper Pond 10GbE).

[24]Bugzilla #454872

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 can detect online growing or
shrinking of an underlying block device. However, there is no
method to automatically detect that a device has changed size, so
manual steps are required to recognize this and resize any file
systems which reside on the given device(s). When a resized block
device is detected, a message like the following will appear in
the system logs:

VFS: busy inodes on changed media or resized disk sdi

If the block device was grown, then this message can be safely
ignored. However, if the block device was shrunk without shrinking
any data set on the block device first, the data residing on the
device may be corrupted.

It is only possible to do an online resize of a filesystem that
was created on the entire LUN (or block device). If there is a
partition table on the block device, then the file system will
have to be unmounted to update the partition table.

[25]Bugzilla #479467

There is a known memory leak with the res_n* family of resolver
routines (i.e. res_nquery, res_nsearch and res_nmkquery). Programs
that use these functions will leak memory over time. It has been
fixed in newer versions of glibc, however, the fix is too invasive
to be applied to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Programs that use
these functions may need to be restarted occasionally to free
memory.

[26]Bugzilla #452513

The number of devices that can be handled during installation of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 depends on the size of the installation
initrd image. Therefore, in situations where there are many
devices attached to a machine (such as heavily populated Fibre
Channel setups) installation will not be possible unless number of
visible devices is reduced.

[27]Bugzilla #492371

During installation anaconda may not remove all the Logical Volume
Manager (LVM) metadata that exists on a system prior to
installation. This extra metadata may cause LVM tools to report
missing volume groups or logical volumes after installation. To
work around this issue, remove the stale LVM metadata after the
installation is complete.

[28]Bugzilla #481190

multipath does not silence the error messages printed by any of
it's callout programs. Therefore, if multipath is run when paths
are down, various error messages may be displayed. The messages
that are displayed depend on the specific callout programs that
multipath is using. For example, if multipath is run while there
are failed scsi devices, scsi_id will print

lt;H>:<B>:<T>:<L>:Unable to get INQUIRY vpd 1 page 0x0.
lt;H>:<B>:<T>:<L>:sg_io failed status 0x0 0x1 0x0 0x0

Or, if multipath -ll is run while an EMC CLARiiON is down, the
mpath_prio_emc priority callout will print query command indicates
error

[29]Bugzilla #453033

References

Visible links
1. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
2. https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/
3. http://mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/
4. http://mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6.4/releasenotes/
5. http://www.redhat.com/support/policy/soc/production/preview_scope/
6. http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/2.0/index.html
7. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=459785
8. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=494022
9. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=443137
10. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=499457
11. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=484117
12. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=468097
13. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=468097
14. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=449648
15. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=452578
16. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=451873
17. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=451873
18. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247351.html
19. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=366961
20. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=429727
21. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=232499
22. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=441870
23. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=456533
24. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=454872
25. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=479467
26. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=452513
27. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=492371
28. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=481190
29. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=453033