>> >Try disabling the parallel port (or at least its interrupt) and see if
>> >the problem Goes Away.
>> 
>> No difference.  Today's GENERIC kernel without lpt* still hangs at the
>> same point.
>
>Try disabling the lpt port in your board's BIOS.

No difference.  

To summarize, a -current i386 GENERIC kernel built today hangs during boot.

On a HP Vectra XU (on which a 7/31 kernel works just great):
   It hangs this after the line starting "biomask ..."

   It still hangs after removing lpt* and sb* from the config and disabling
	the parallel port from the BIOS.

The same kernel (-current as of today, GENERIC) was tried an a 486/66
(Tangent computer) on which I have been running my production
Laboratory (currently at 1.2).  It hung even earlier in the process.
It hung after printing "isa0 at mainbus0".  The dmesg for this machine
from 1.2 is:

NetBSD 1.2 (LDC) #0: Fri Oct 25 10:27:38 PDT 1996
    phil@puffin:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/LDC
CPU: i486DX (GenuineIntel 486-class CPU)
real mem  = 7995392
avail mem = 6066176
using 123 buffers containing 503808 bytes of memory
mainbus0 (root)
isa0 at mainbus0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4: ns8250 or ns16450, no fifo
com1 at isa0 port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3: ns8250 or ns16450, no fifo
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x378-0x37f irq 7
wdc0 at isa0 port 0x1f0-0x1f7 irq 14
wd0 at wdc0 drive 0: 325MB, 1010 cyl, 12 head, 55 sec, 512 bytes/sec <WDC AC2340H>
wd0: using 16-sector 16-bit pio transfers, chs addressing
ed2 at isa0 port 0x300-0x31f irq 10
ed2: address 00:00:1b:4d:4c:db, type NE2000 (16-bit)
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0-0xff: using exception 16
pc0 at isa0 port 0x60-0x6f irq 1: color
lms0 at isa0 port 0x23c-0x23f irq 5
fdc0 at isa0 port 0x3f0-0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2
fd0 at fdc0 drive 0: 1.44MB 80 cyl, 2 head, 18 sec
biomask 4040 netmask 4440 ttymask 44fa

-- 
Phil Nelson                       NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu           LPF: http://www.lpf.org
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil       !gifs: http://www.lpf.org/Patents/Gif/Gif.html