Okay, I commented out the lines causing the panic, and proceeded to compile
and boot... I ran into an initial problem with gettys not being able to read
any of my virtual consoles, but I chalked that up to pcvt support (or
rather, lack of it) and modified /etc/ttys to disable everything except
console. Now it boots fine, but upgrading to -current is proving to be
really difficult.

Here's what I did so far:

compiled new CATS kernel and rebooted
modified /etc/ttys (see above paragraph)
cd /usr/src/share/mk ; make install
cd /usr/src/usr.bin/make ; make ; make install
cd /usr/src/bin ; make ; make install
cd /usr/src/sbin ; make ; make install
cd /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/binutils ; make  ** fails
cd /usr/src/gnu/lib/bfd ; make  ** fails

in both cases and all subsequent attempts, every attempt to compile
*anything* with cc/as failes with signal 11. I think I'm going to go back to
my CATS CDROM snapshot (dated 10/06/98) and try again.. anyone else had
better luck? I wonder if I messed up by compiling /usr/src/bin and
/usr/src/sbin first before binutils and ld, but I'm not sure. If anyone has
thoughts on that I'd like to hear them.

thanks,
Edwin

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Edwin Foo
Compaq Computer Corp. - Cambridge Research Lab 
MIT EECS BS '98, M. Eng. '99