Greetings,

I have had my work laptop for well over a year now running SL6 and
everything has been fantastic. Never once have I had a kernel
panic/problem. That is until the latest updates of which the kernel(+
its extras) were the only things that were updated. Rolling back to the
previous kernel works perfectly, so I could just remove the kernel and
hope for the best in the future, but if it is feasible I would like to
track down the problem so that someone who knows what they are doing
might be able to fix it (and who knows, maybe it is already fixed
upstream?).

My laptop is Dell Precision M4600. 80% of the time it is plugged into my
Dell PRO2X laptop dock which has my dual Display Port Dell U2410
monitors (betcha can't tell what vendor my employer frequently buys
from... ;-)

My working kernel is: 2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64 (and anything before).

The problem kernel is: 2.6.32-431.1.2.el6.x86_64

There are two problems I am seeing.
1) VMWare workstation crashes constantly on the new kernel. And when it
does, full kernel panic. It happens frequently, but not something that I
can guarantee a crash if I do $actionA. I have a lot of VM's I do dev
work in and so far it has been a different VM every time it has crashed.
Never have had this problem with Workstation or this laptop.

2) This is the biggest one that annoys me. I get horrible color
distortions on the secondary display. This happens every time. At BIOS
both monitors display perfect color in a twin view showing the same
image on both screens. Grub only shows primary screen (normal for this
setup). When Grub loads the nouveau display driver the second screen
turns on and the display looks like a rainbow puked glitter. Not even
exaggerating. Crazy jumbled colors in warped patterns that move across
the screen. The primary monitor is just fine. At first I thought it was
the monitor, but swapping the monitors shows they are fine. Other
testing showed that the hardware is just fine too and the final proof
was evident by being able to boot into the previous kernel and not
having an issue.

I never have run the NVidia drivers on this laptop. It has always been
Nouveau. (I run NVidia drivers on other systems, but this laptop has
previously always been rock solid with SL+Nouveau so I never bothered).

As stated, I can reboot into another kernel and everything is fine. In
fact, I already set the old kernel to be default at boot. But if
possible, I would like to track this down.

What I am asking is:

1) Is it worth the time to track down? Anyone know if there have been a
bunch of Nouveau issues/patches pushed upstream that might be worth
investigating first?

2) I can put the kernel into all kinds of debugging and capture GB's of
data, but I would prefer to capture only what is useful. Any
recommendations on what output I should capture?

3) Any suggestions on narrowing the problem down to something other then
"Its the kernel"?

Thanks! I appreciate the help!