I just finished updating all of my CentOS 6 machines, resulting in a couple of machines (VMs) no longer booting:

Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

It appears that “yum update” installs the new kernel:

[root@c3p0 boot]# rpm -qa |grep ^kernel-
kernel-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64
kernel-firmware-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.noarch
kernel-firmware-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.noarch
kernel-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64

… but no initramfs is created under /boot:

[root@c3p0 boot]# ls -l /boot
total 25561
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 100203 Oct 6 20:44 config-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 97911 Jun 27 21:08 config-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 1024 Aug 16 12:58 efi
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 1024 Dec 1 17:15 grub
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 13435614 Aug 16 12:59 initramfs-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64.img
drwx------. 2 root root 12288 Aug 16 12:54 lost+found
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 165827 Oct 6 20:47 symvers-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 160602 Jun 27 21:11 symvers-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 2279162 Oct 6 20:44 System.map-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 2228188 Jun 27 21:08 System.map-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 3882992 Oct 6 20:44 vmlinuz-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 3795744 Jun 27 21:08 vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64

Also, in /etc/boot/grub.conf, the initrd entry is missing for the new kernel:

[root@c3p0 boot]# cat /etc/grub.conf
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root
#          initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/vda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS Linux (2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64 ro root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_root rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_swap rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us crashkernel=auto rhgb quiet
title CentOS (2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64 ro root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_root rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_swap rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us crashkernel=auto rhgb quiet
	initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64.img

I remember seeing this problem before on a fairly recent Fedora system, probably Fedora 14 or 15, but never on older CentOS / RHEL releases.

My guess is that this is a problem with Dracut. You can re-generate the initramfs by running dracut (as root, of course), but I’d rather not have to perform emergency surgery on lots of (virtual) machines…

Anyway, the command line would look like this:

dracut initramfs-${version}.img ${version}
dracut initramfs-2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64.img 2.6.32-131.17.1.el6.x86_64

Updated: