>> 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 Thanks for the advice. Df reports that /boot has 80% free space right now; I would assume that's enough but I don't know. I need to remove a few of the old kernels I've got taking up space. There are a few initramfs-*kdump.img files that have appeared that I assume might be helpful in tracking down the problems? I changed the boot arguments (and also added the args to automatically reboot following a panic, which fixes one of my problems), and I'm definitely getting kernel panics. Both 4.4.39-1 and 4.9.0-1 end up with pretty much the same issue: "Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt." I know the details of the panic can/should be kept in a log somewhere, but that's where my limited experience fails me--I see references to Xorg.0.log and boot.log online, but those seem to only keep the details of the most recent boot. I used the not-so-high-tech method of taking a photo of my laptop's screen output before it restarted, and it seems like the panic details for both kernels started with a "BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000008" and followed shortly by an "Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP." Beyond that, the behavior seems to be somewhat inconsistent--the first time I booted the 4.9 kernel without the quiet rhgb args it seemed to hang on something related to ipv6 setup without actually getting into a panic, but I foolishly didn't capture any of the other details. The pre-7.3 4.4.36-1 kernel that had been working just fine now seems to fail in a panic every other boot, and I'm currently working from within the latest 3.10.0-514 kernel that came with 7.3, which had previously failed to boot in a panic as well. This is somewhat embarassing because I was feeling pretty confident that I had pretty much gotten the hang of regular Linux use, but now it feels like I somehow caused some major problems when I updated to 7.3 (though I didn't do anything beyond "yum update.") If I were back on Windows, this would be the part where I backup my files and start from a fresh install, since that was usually the least painless way to fix major system problems. Is there a possibility that this is fixable, or would that be a good strategy to employ here? Or does this suggest something more serious, like a hardware issue? My apologies for dragging beginner's issues here into a mailing list for an enterprise OS; CentOS just works so nicely, decently responsive with low resource usage and was (up until now) completely stable on my aging X301. Thanks again.