[CentOS] Problems after update to 5.5

Mon May 17 05:20:50 UTC 2010
JohnS <jses27 at gmail.com>

On Sun, 2010-05-16 at 20:10 -0400, C Linus Hicks wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 12:27 +0100, Colin Coles wrote:
> > Hi,
> >  I have updated 8 machines so far and 2 are refusing to boot on 
> > 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 kernel, they just hang at: 'Starting udev:' but when I 
> > revert to 2.6.18-164.15.1.el5 kernel they boot fine. Any pointers?
> 
> I just updated a machine and also got a hang at udev. When I revert to
> kernel 2.6.18-164 it works fine. It appears to be a hard hang. Caps lock
> and num lock have no effect and I have to hit the reset button.
> 
> I tried increasing udev log level to debug and it did not hang. I
> reduced the log level to info and it still did not hang. However, when I
> start X, esd seems to get stuck in a loop on a short segment of audio.
> If I kill esd, the desktop will finish initializing. Logging out of X
> also hung, but killing X manually worked. I have reverted to the old
> kernel.
---
I am just wondering if any of you guys with the udev hang problem have
tried:
rpm -e the new kernel?  Then try to reinstall it via yum install.  You
should delete the new kernel from /var/cache/yum first.

Just a point in why I say that is I have seen several machines that have
yummed corrupt packages and bad repo metadata.  After pegging yum to
pull from a distinct mirror the problem has gone away.

John