[CentOS] grub (?) issue on Optiplex 780 A15, 6.8 upgrade

Mon May 30 15:30:18 UTC 2016
Zube <Zube at stat.colostate.edu>

Most of the upgrades to CentOS 6.8 have gone smoothly.  Thanks, as
always, for all the work that goes into making it so easy to upgrade.

On a few machines, however, all of them curiously:

Dell Inc. OptiPlex 780                 /0C27VV, BIOS A15 08/06/2013

There is something wrong with their interaction with grub (?).
I noticed this after adding '3' to the module line to get it to
runlevel 3, but the machine came up at runlevel 5 anyway.

On machines that are working correctly, the dmesg output looks
like this:

Command line: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-642.el6.x86_64 ro 
root=UUID=20a8bd64-5783-4007-a5e4-e41bfc07f3c8
intel_iommu=on rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_NO_MD
SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 crashkernel=auto  KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us
rd_NO_DM rhgb rdblacklist=nouveau quiet

if the options are on the module line or like this:

Command line: ro root=UUID=7d11ff13-106f-42df-9a41-9ebf2505f6d2
rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
crashkernel=auto rdblacklist=nouveau

if the options are on the kernel line.  But on the offending
machines, it looks like this:

Command line: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-642.el6.x86_64 ro
root=UUID=2a0a0120-8155-4ef4-8048-c82567746ca9 intel_iommu=on
amd_iommu=on rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_NO_MD
SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 crashkernel=auto  KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us
rd_NO_DM rhgb quiet rdblacklist=nouveaulevel:

RAID 0: Stripes data (performance).
RAID 1: Mirrors data (redundancy).
Recovery: Copies data between a master and a recovery disk.

So something seems to be scribbling somewhere where it shouldn't.

These machines are not RAIDed in any way and I'm confident that
I didn't see this problem when I upgraded to 6.7.  If I reduce
the length of the module line, it just scribbles a bit further
back, i.e. "rdblacklist=nouveau1(Mirror)"

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers,
Zube