gee, thanks red hat, amd, and vmware
At least the publicly-searchable knowledge base had something. I tried searching for “Kernel panic – not syncing: Fatal Exception” and “RIP” and “cpuid4_cache_lookup”. And wouldn’t you know it! There’s a known issue if you try to install RHEL >5.4 x64 on ESXi 4.x if it’s running on AMD 6000 series CPUs. Guess what – we’re…