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You need to capture the actual panic, or else it's just guessing. Boot without the rhgb quiet kernel args.

Also check it's not just something silly like running out os space on /boot causing incomplete/corrupt initramfs.

jh

Thanks for the advice. Df reports that /boot has 80% free space right now; I would assume that's enough but I don't know. I need to remove a few of the old kernels I've got taking up space. There are a few initramfs-*kdump.img files that have appeared that I assume might be helpful in tracking down the problems?

I changed the boot arguments (and also added the args to automatically reboot following a panic, which fixes one of my problems), and I'm definitely getting kernel panics. Both 4.4.39-1 and 4.9.0-1 end up with pretty much the same issue: "Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt." I know the details of the panic can/should be kept in a log somewhere, but that's where my limited experience fails me--I see references to Xorg.0.log and boot.log online, but those seem to only keep the details of the most recent boot. I used the not-so-high-tech method of taking a photo of my laptop's screen output before it restarted, and it seems like the panic details for both kernels started with a "BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000008" and followed shortly by an "Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP."

Beyond that, the behavior seems to be somewhat inconsistent--the first time I booted the 4.9 kernel without the quiet rhgb args it seemed to hang on something related to ipv6 setup without actually getting into a panic, but I foolishly didn't capture any of the other details. The pre-7.3 4.4.36-1 kernel that had been working just fine now seems to fail in a panic every other boot, and I'm currently working from within the latest 3.10.0-514 kernel that came with 7.3, which had previously failed to boot in a panic as well.

This is somewhat embarassing because I was feeling pretty confident that I had pretty much gotten the hang of regular Linux use, but now it feels like I somehow caused some major problems when I updated to 7.3 (though I didn't do anything beyond "yum update.") If I were back on Windows, this would be the part where I backup my files and start from a fresh install, since that was usually the least painless way to fix major system problems. Is there a possibility that this is fixable, or would that be a good strategy to employ here? Or does this suggest something more serious, like a hardware issue?

My apologies for dragging beginner's issues here into a mailing list for an enterprise OS; CentOS just works so nicely, decently responsive with low resource usage and was (up until now) completely stable on my aging X301.

Thanks again.