[CentOS] Panic on boot with 7.3 kernels when decrypting hard drive

Wed Dec 14 09:18:29 UTC 2016
John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk>

On Wed, 14 Dec 2016, Christopher St. Louis wrote:

> 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?

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