I just got a new HP z840 - dual E5-2667 v4 CPUs. After installing our company's official Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 64-bit image, it throws a kernel panic during boot. This happens with installed RHEL 6.7 and via a live DVD/USB CentOS 6.7 and CentOS 6.8. HP lists RHEL 6 as a supported operating system.
I tried adding the boot option nomodeset, no help. When installing RHEL 6.7 via kickstart I gave the dd option to include the HP provided driver disc for RHEL 6.7 but it said the driver disc was incorrect; I also tried downloading it from HP and providing that instead; no luck.
A live DVD/USB of Ubuntu 16.04 or CentOS 7.3 boot successfully.
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
Pid: 1, comm: init Not tainted 2.6.32-573.el6.x86_64 #1
Call Trace:
panic [hex addresses omitted]
do_exit
fput
do_group_exit
sys_exit_group
system_call_fastpath
drm_kms_helper: panic occurred, switching back to text console