[CentOS] CentOS 6.4 kernel panic on boot after upgrading kernel to 2.6.32-431.29.2

Wed Oct 15 13:22:04 UTC 2014
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 10/13/2014 11:18 PM, Joakim Ziegler wrote:
> I'm on a Supermicro server, X9DA7 motherboard, Intel C602 chipset, 2x 
> 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5-2665 8-core CPU, 96GB RAM, and I'm running CentOS 
> 6.4.
>
> I just tried to use yum to upgrade the kernel from 2.6.32-358 to 
> 2.6.32-431.29.2. However, I get a kernel panic on boot. The first 
> kernel panic I got included stuff about acpi, so I tried adding noacpi 
> noapic to the kernel boot parameters, which at least changed the 
> kernel panic message, now I get (transcribed from a photo I took, so 
> please excuse any errors):
...

First question:  can you boot with the old kernel still (by default 
CentOS 6 leaves a few old kernels around; I want to say the default is 
3, but it might be 5, I don't recall, and I don't have a straight 
default C6 install to check against right at the moment)?

Next question: did you also update the updated kernel-firmware package 
for the updated kernel?

The first thing I would do is downgrade the kernel and make sure the 
system is working there; you then will need to very carefully check all 
your hardware components together that the kernel update should be ok.  
You mention GPU's; which drivers are you using there? Iterate over all 
hardware.

Now, I'm going to sound like a broken record here.  If you absolutely 
positively must stay at a point release for whatever reason (and there 
are valid reasons for this), then you don't need to be running CentOS; 
it is simply not supported.  You either need to pay up for RHEL6 with 
EUS, or you need to install ScientificLinux 6 (built from the same 
sources that CentOS is built from, with a different rebranding); the SL 
team does support getting only critical updates but staying on a 
particular point release.