In case anyone's interested in a followup, the same 16MB
box is happily in the late phases of "make build" (same
source tree, same binary set) now that everything is on a
disk...

So, something related to NFS seems to eat physical memory.
Is an intuition that it has to do with attributes worthwhile?

(I know this isn't a terribly important issue, and that 
a trace of the NFS transactions prior to the panic would
have been helpful...)

	Sean.