Kernel Panic At Boot

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Hi All,

This is a CentOS 6.4 system used as a home server and Myth backend machine. It has just suffered a motherboard failure and I have got a identical replacement.

This machine normally runs in run level 3. It has a NVidia graphics card and the NVidia driver installed but I found it crashed the machine as soon as I started X on there. So I never bothered with X and left it in RL3.

So as part of the re-commissioning of this machine I decided to remove the NVidia driver and go back to Nouveau. I shouldn’t have bothered.

Even starting in RL1 it kernel panics at bootup toward the end of the boot process. If I boot it in level 3 all the daemons start and it runs a little bit of script I have in rc.local to enable ACL’s and then panics.

The panic is something like

panic occurred, switching back to text console. general protection fault: 0000 [#2] SMP
last sysfs file: /sys/devices/virtual/block/dm-5/dm/name CPU 1
Modules linked in: “……..list of modules…….”

Pid: 147, comm: plymouthd Tainted: G D ——————-
2.6.32-358.6.2.el6.x86_64 #1 Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd P43-ES3G/P43-ES3G

There’s a list of CPU registers and a call trace after that. I have a photo of the screen if that information is useful

Any idea how I can trace this.

Many thanks

Ken

3 thoughts on - Kernel Panic At Boot

  • thtas a rather old motherboard, like circa 2008? my longtime experiences with consumer desktop grade hardware suggest that at 5
    years, 50% of them go flaky. that one is about 8 years old now.

  • John R Pierce wrote:

    I know its old. I have quite a few (5) PCI video capture cards in there for MythTV and very few modern motherboards have PCI interfaces these days. Moving to something more recent would also mean scrapping those cards.

    That said, I doubt that the age of the motherboard is related to the kernel panic after I stupidly de-installed the NVidia driver. It would be a sad double fault that the previously unused (but old) replacement mother board suffered a failure at the same time as I de-installed the NVidia driver. That would be very bad luck.

    I have subsequently found that the 2.6.32-358.el6.x86_64 kernel still boots fine on there so I very much doubt I’m on the trail of a hardware fault.

    Would I be safe just to reinstall the 2.6.32-358.6.2.el6.x86_64 kernel?

    Thanks

    Ken

  • Ken Smith wrote:

    You *might* consider installing the proprietary driver. Make sure to get the correct one from the NVidia website. Trust me, I do it for several folks here, including myself, since my soon-to-be-retired workstation has an old NVidia card… and nouveau didn’t, at least, do two monitors.

    mark