kernel panic after policy update failure

[jsfarrow comcast net]

I just updated (via yum) to policy-1.9.2-9 on kernel 2.6.4.1-300 and get the following on reboot:

Enforcing mode requested but no policy loaded.  Halting now.
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

I tried adding "selinux=0" to the kernel args, and also tried booting single user, but get the same result.  I had to boot rescue mode off the iso disc and turn off selinux in /etc/sysconfig/selinux.  Now I can boot again.

It turns out that the policy rpm upgrade failed.  No biggie, but I am wondering whether it is expected behaviour that you get a kernel panic if you attempt to boot with selinux enabled, but without a policy file (or a damaged file)?  As a sysadmin, that concerns me.  Perhaps a gentler behaviour would be to dump you in single user mode?

- J. Scott Farrow