The 2.9 series release notes contain important changes in this release series.
Meltdown
This release addresses the Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) attack. This has been fixed in the 3.16.51-3+deb8u1 release from Debian. Please note that this patch does not address the Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) vulnerability. A fix is not available for the Spectre vulnerability yet.
Internally conducted benchmarks indicate the performance impact is limited to a 2-5% increase in CPU usage on most platforms. The impact can vary depending on your usage and platform though. If you see a significant performance difference, don't hesitate to reach out to Enterprise Support.
Note on Hotpatching
The hotpatch contains an upgrade to the kernel and requires a reboot. The Meltdown attack is not fixed until a reboot is performed.
Security Fixes
- HIGH: Kernel is updated to 3.16.51-3+deb8u1 which implements Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) to address Meltdown.
Known Issues
- We incorrectly redirect to the dashboard if you accessed GitHub Enterprise using an alias while in private mode. This might happen if you set a fully qualified domain name but the subdomain resolves correctly.
- Images uploaded to issues save with an absolute URL, so they can be broken if the hostname changes.
- On a freshly set up GitHub Enterprise without any users, an attacker could create the first admin user.
- Custom firewall rules aren't maintained during an upgrade.
svn checkout may timeout while the repository data cache is being built. In most cases, subsequent svn checkout attempts will succeed.- Git LFS tracked files uploaded through the web interface are incorrectly added directly to the repository.
- GitHub Enterprise clustering can not be configured without https.
- Deleting a search index doesn't delete all associated metadata, which are then incorrectly reused if a new search index is created. This causes search index repair jobs to be reported as finished in the site admin when they were not.
- The create team API endpoint returns a 500 error if LDAP Sync is enabled and the team already exists.
Thanks!
The GitHub Team