This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
The current version of virtio-console doesn't handle hot-unplug properly: it leads to accessing memory outside the driver's memory area and can cause guest kernel panics. There are a few ways to trigger this, one of them: 1. Open a virtio-console port in the guest (eg /dev/vport0p1) 2. Block the port on read (eg cat /dev/vport0p1 with host chardev connected) 3. Hot-unplug the port (using the device_del command for the qemu monitor) 4. Close the port in the guest Patches are queued for inclusion upstream. Note that by default only root is allowed to open a virtio-console port, so this can't be triggered by an unprivileged user in the default setup.
in kernel-2.6.18-227.el5 You can download this test kernel (or newer) from http://people.redhat.com/jwilson/el5 Detailed testing feedback is always welcomed.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0017.html