As CentOS 7 (1511) was released, I thought it would be a good idea to update several of my home machines (including kids' workstations) with that version, and also newer kernel. Usually that's just a smooth operation, but sometimes some backported features/new features, especially in the kernel, can lead to some strange issues. That's what happened for my older Thinkpad Edge : That's a cheap/small thinkpad that Lenovo did several years ago ( circa 2011 ), and that I used a lot just when travelling, as it only has a AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo K345 Dual-Core Processor. So basically not a lot of horse power, but still something convenient just to read your mails, remotely connect through ssh, or browse the web. When rebooting on the newer kernel, it panics directly.

Two bug reports are open for this, one on the CentOS Bug tracker, linked also to the upstream one. Current status is that there is no kernel update that will fix this, but there is a easy to implement workaround :

• boot with the initcall_blacklist=clocksource_done_booting kernel parameter added (or reboot on previous kernel)
• once booted, add the same parameter at the end of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=" .." line , in the file /etc/default/grub
• as root, run grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.conf

Hope it can help others too