Dave Huang writes:
> I guess that would be me... :) I still haven't had the assertion failure 
> ever since I upgraded to NetBSD-current, but about two days ago, when 
> booting, I got this message:

> sd0(ncr0:0:0): non-media hardware failure, data = 6d 00 0f bf eb 83 fd ff
> 74 14 80 0e 02 8b ac 24 ac 01 ... etc (it was about 6 lines of hex dump,
> and I didn't feel like writing it all down :) Is there any way to get
> these kernel messages sent to a serial port, btw?) It repeated that
> message about 6 or 7 times before the system panicked (unable to mount 
> root, I believe).

I started having similar problems on a kernel a couple of weeks old,
on an ASUS SP3G with inbuilt 53c810.
It started when I enabled the 'dram hidden refresh' option, and
happened 3 times out of 6 reboots (I was "tuning" the kernel options,
and occasionally hammering the disk)
Setting it back to 'normal refresh' has so far cured the problem; I've
fired up X (broke it twice with hidden refresh), started ppp, etc.
Note that I have MAXBSIZE = 32k.

So, it may be a timing issue? Nothing else seems to mind the hidden
refresh (e.g, benchmarks, win95, etc)