[CentOS] Kernel panic after update to 6.4

Sat Mar 16 17:45:36 UTC 2013
Emmett Culley <emmett at webengineer.com>

On 03/14/2013 08:03 AM, Emmett Culley wrote:
> On 03/12/2013 05:08 PM, Emmett Culley wrote:
>> On 03/12/2013 04:23 PM, lists-centos wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------ Original Message ------------
>>>> Date: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 04:05:28 PM -0700
>>>> From: Emmett Culley <emmett at webengineer.com>
>>>> To: centos at centos.org
>>>> Cc:
>>>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Kernel panic after update to 6.4
>>>>
>>>> On 03/12/2013 01:48 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:41 PM, Emmett Culley
>>>>> <emmett at webengineer.com> wrote:
>>>>>> After successfully updating three CentOS 6.3 VM guests to 6.4 I
>>>>>> decided to update the host as well.  And it failed to boot.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Kernel panic - Not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
>>>>>> Pid: 1, comm: init not tainted: 2.6.32-358.2.1.el6.x86_64 #1
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time of this writing, CentOS kernel 2.6.32-358.2.1.el6 is
>>>>> not out yet. Where did you get this one from ???  Did you build it
>>>>> yourself?
>>>>>
> I figured out that in both failure cases the "yum update" was never completed as I had to run yum-complete-transaction on both.  And doing that and re-installing the 358.0.1 had the same boot failures.
> 
> Yesterday I did another update which installed the 358.2.1 kernel, which booted.  So I guess I'll attempt to update the host machine.
> 
> I don't know what happened, but it seems to be resolved.
> 
> Emmett
> 
Yesterday I upgraded all of the guests (4) and the host to the "358.2.1" kernel.  All of the VMs restarted fine, but the host has the same boot failure.

But I have some new information that might make a difference.

First:  When I first saw this issue on two machines, I had updated the machines to 6.4 while logged via VNC.  Since both of the failures also had incomplete updates and required me to run yum-complete-transaction, I assumed that those yum update session failures were the reason for the boot failure.  Because I assume the update caused the vncserver to reset, interrupting the yum update session.

So this time I ran the updates via ssh.  All went well, all updates completed, but the host fails to boot on the "358.2.1" kernel.

Here is the new information.  When the host boots on the previous "good" kernel I see the simplified plymouth trail (the tri-color tape that runs along the bottom of the screen during boot).  But when it boots from the "bad" kernels I see the "fancy" centos splash, with the spinning circle under the CentOS logo.

In all cases, the VM guests all boot with the simplified splash.  So I suppose that means the the new kernel installation is incorrectly detecting my video hardware.

Can anybody suggest some changes I can make to the kernel parameters that could mitigate that mid-detection?

Emmett