Raspberry Pi - Kernal Panic solved by using rpi-update

Updating Raspberry Pi Firmware and Kernel

Anyway...  I was having some stability issues with the raspberry pi when running my iPlayer personal podcast and was being presented with a "Kernel panic - not syncing : Fatal exception in interrupt" error every couple of days.  My issues seem to be consistent with those experienced by other people when the raspberry pi is under heavy load.

Some advice suggested updating the pi's firmware and kernel, which initially sounded a bit scary, but there is a great tool called rpi-update which automates the process.  Once I did this my raspberry pi became much more stable and I havent experienced a Kernel panic since.

These instructions were taken from https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/ head here for more information and options, but if you want to follow the 'default' update you can use the information below.

Download rpi-update

sudo wget http://goo.gl/1BOfJ -O /usr/bin/rpi-update && chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update

Install ca-certificates

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates

Run rpi-update
Note - rpi-update must be run as root

sudo rpi-update

The first time you run rpi-update you will likely be presented with an error:

/opt/vc/sbin/vcfiled: error while loading shared libraries: libvchiq_arm.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is, apparently, nothing to worry about and the update will have completed successfully, see forum for more details.