And thus spake Jonathan R. Hinds:
> This does not seem to be too much slower. And the kernel is still taking
> upwards of 12 hours to compile.

This reminds me of the days when I ran NetBSD 1.0 on my old 486SLC2/66
with 16MB. The system worked fine normally, but would seem to `freeze'
on big compiles. There'd be no activity: no disk writes, and the compiler
would stay on the same file for ages. Touching a single key on the
console would unwedge it. So one solution is to periodically tap
the keyboard.

If I recall, another solution was to start a background loop on another
VT doing:

    while /bin/true; do
	sleep 60
	date
    done

I was never able to track down why this happened -- I didn't even
know where to begin. There were never any console messages. And
from trawling the mail-indices, it looks like I never reported it.

-- 
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." -- Aldous Huxley