A security vulnerability in the Solaris 10 Virtual File System (VFS) may allow a local unprivileged user to exhaust all kernel memory, thereby causing a Denial of Service (DoS) to the system as a whole.

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 without patch 127111-01

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 without patch 127112-01

Note: Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 are not affected by this issue.

If the described issue occurs, the system will slow down considerably and eventually become unresponsive.

When the system is slow but not unresponsive, the vmstat(1M) utility can be used to ascertain the occurrence of this issue. The following command can be run to query the virtual memory usage on the system every 3 seconds:

   $ vmstat 3

Should the described issue occur, the "free" column under the "memory" section of the output reduces quickly to less than 1% of the physical memory available on the system.

There is no workaround. Please see the "Resolution" section below.

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 127111-01 or later

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 127112-01 or later

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