Juergen Hannken-Illjes <hannken@eis.cs.tu-bs.de>  wrote:
 > Due to a codegen bug in egcs-1.2/sparc, /sbin/dump dumps bad sets.
 > This is reported in PR bin/7735.
 > 
 > You could try to change the following line from sbin/dump/tape.c,
 > function writerec()
 > 
 > 	*(union u_spcl *)(*(nextblock)++) = *(union u_spcl *)dp;
 > 
 > to
 > 	*(union u_spcl *)(*nextblock) = *(union u_spcl *)dp;
 > 	nextblock += 1;
 > 
 > The problem in short:
 > 
 > 	the post-increment is done BEFORE the assignment.

well I checked out a current 'dump', made the change, and tried 
again...  I still see the same symptoms:

db> ps /w
 PID          COMMAND     EMUL  PRI UTIME STIME WAIT-MSG    WAIT-CHANNEL
 11349           dump   netbsd   40   0.2   0.6 pause       0xf7e1a070
 11348           dump   netbsd   40   0.2   0.6 pause       0xf7dfa3a8
 11347           dump   netbsd   40   0.2   0.7 pause       0xf7dfa6f0
 11346           dump   netbsd   24   1.3   0.6 netio       0xf06cfc24
 11338           dump   netbsd   32  24.9  48.2 wait        0xf7e24920


'systat iostat' shows no I/O from any of the disks in question.