14 DAY TRIAL // A few Linux kernel vulnerabilities have been found in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) operating system and they have been corrected.
The Linux kernel for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) has been upgraded and a few issues have been fixed by the devs. This is regular update work and it's unlikely that you were affected by any of these bugs.
"A race condition with MMIO and PIO transactions in the KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) subsystem of the Linux kernel was discovered. A guest OS user could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (guest OS crash) via a specially crafted application," is noted in the security notice.
These is just one of the vulnerabilities closed by this update, and Ubuntu users will get the new version via the Software Update.
The security flaws can be fixed if users upgrade the system to the linux-image-3.16.0-29-generic, (3.16.0-29.39), but this is only true for Ubuntu 14.10S (Utopic Unicorn). Other operating systems feature different Linux kernels and the versions will be different.
ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change, the kernel packages have a new version number, which will force you to reinstall and recompile all third-party kernel modules you might have installed. Moreover, if you use the linux-restricted-modules package, you have to update it as well to get modules that work with the new Linux kernel version.
It's worth mentioning that the kernel for other supported Ubuntu OSes have been updated as well.