Issue

After reserving hugepages on kernel cmdline system fails to boot; however, system is able to reserve same amount of hugepages via sysctl vm.nr_hugepages in /etc/sysctl.conf

As boot fails very early a vmcore is not possible to be collected; however, the console may have messages similar to the following:

Command line: ro root=/dev/mapper/rootvg-rootlv rd_NO_LUKS rd_LVM_LV=rootvg/rootlv
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_NO_MD rd_LVM_LV=rootvg/swaplv SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16
crashkernel=auto KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rd_NO_DM hugepages=51610

<snip>

Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
Freeing initrd memory: 16402k freed
audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled)
type=2000 audit(1367579269.669:1): initialized
Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 1997.833 MHz.
Switching to clocksource tsc
BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 67s! [migration/0:5]
Modules linked in:
CPU 0 
Modules linked in:
BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 67s! [swapper:1]
Modules linked in:
CPU 1 
Modules linked in:

Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.32-358.el6.x86_64 #1 HP ProLiant DL580 G7
RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff811338fb>]  [<ffffffff811338fb>] shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x1ab/0x610