Another data point or two:

With all this rebooting of my CATS machine to attempt installation of a
-current kernel, it has come to my attention that the DRAM initialization
occasionally fails -- something like 1 out of every 5 reboots.

The symptom is that it gets to the point where it "bleedles" (it beeps a few
times rapidly) and prints "DIMM0" but then it hangs.

So far, whenever this has happened, I have pressed the reset button and it
has booted fine. I have not observed it to hang like this two boots in a row.

I am still investigating the kernel panic that I get; I just started a -g
build of the kernel to see if it gives DDB anything more to work with.

I also tried to get a crash dump after the panic, typing 'c' into the DDB
prompt, but it hung without any disk activity after printing a message that
did seem like it was about to write something.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com