El Capitan gives me a kernel panic error right after installing Almost immediately after the installation reboot, and seconds after the apple logo appears the following error shows up;

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff8017d263a6) : "zone_init;kmem_suballoc failed"@/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-3247.1.106/osfmkkern/zall oc.c:2199


This is a 2010 iMac running the latest Yosemite with all updates installed. 

Any guesses for the cause?

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac11,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
This is really basic memory allocation that's failing (zalloc.c) - and even if your install was completely trashed by outside forces, I'd expect a panic just about anywhere else in the system. This is a pretty low level failure.

If you can't get a recovery install to work, your next step is to call support, because this looks very much like a hardware problem.