An apparent Denial of Service (DoS) issue relating to Sun M-class servers
was reported by three OpenBSD developers to the Full-Disclosure mailing
list:

http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2008-September/064312.html

The issue as described relates that the OpenBSD/sparc64 kernel can trigger
a fault which causes the dynamic domain of a Sun M-class server to power
down. Sun has investigated this issue and would like to provide the
following details to help clarify the impact as well as the contributing
factors.

• This issue applies to Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 Servers and Sun
  SPARC Enterprise M5000 Servers only.
  
• This issue does not apply to the above systems when Solaris is
  installed.
  
• This issue is seen with OpenBSD/sparc64 due to a device driver and
  thus can not be triggered by an unprivileged user.
  
• The OpenBSD/sparc64 device driver causes a hardware fault to occur
  and since the dynamic domains in Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and
  M5000 servers share major hardware components the hardware fault
  causes the M-class server processor to shut down the entire platform.
  
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers are cold service
  systems and thus to clear a hardware fault the system must be powered
  off.
  

tags: dos m4000 m5000 openbsd vulnerability

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