I was excited to update my system to CentOS 7.3/1611 yesterday when the release announcement came through, but since then I've been running into some serious kernel issues.

I've been successfully running 7.2 on a Thinkpad X301 for about 6 months now, with an encrypted disk that unlocks with a password at boot time. I think that's LUKS on LVM? I didn't tinker with the default encryption options so it's nothing too exotic: unencrypted /boot on sda1, encrypted system/home on sda2. I've used both the standard 3.10 kernels and 4.4 kernels from the kernel-lt package from ELrepo with no problems so far.

When performing the update to 7.3 yesterday, the packages kernel-lt-4.4.38-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64 and kernel-3.10.0-514.2.2.el7.x86_64 were installed. With both of those, my system comes to a complete, frozen halt on boot, after I've entered my disk decryption key and before I see a login screen. The little progress spinner freezes, and the caps lock light on my keyboard starts blinking, which I've been told indicates a kernel panic. Any manner of key combinations, even the "magic SysRq" combinations do nothing to recover the system--the only way out is to cut the power. I was able to fall back to the still-installed 4.4.36-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64 kernel with no problems. On a whim, I tried installing the latest mainline kernel from ELrepo as well (kernel-ml-4.9.0-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64) and encountered a similar hard lock, minus the blinkenlight in the caps lock key.

Has anyone else had a similar issue? Is there anything in what I've described that sounds obvious to what the solution is? It really just seems like the problems are with kernels that have come through following the 7.3 release. I'm still somewhat new at getting into the inner workings of Linux, but is there a log that might shed some light on what went wrong?

Thanks in advance,

--C