On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 07:51:57PM -0800, Michael K. Sanders wrote:
> I tried booting the 20011206-1.5Z snapshot on an Intel SCB2 board
> with 4GB RAM and it failed like this (copied by hand):
> 
> [ netbsd ELF symbol table not valid ]
> [ netbsd a.out symbol table not valid ]
> [ no symbol table formats found ]
> ...
> cpu0: Intel Pentium III (Tualatin) (686-class), 1263.59MHz
> ...
> total memory: 4031 MB
> panic: cpu_startup: cannot allocate VM for buffers
> Stopped in pid 0 () at 0xc025b428:	Leave
> db>

Short term you could try 'options BUFPAGES=4096' or something.
I have this problem on my 1.5GB box if I set BUFCACHE=10 or higher.
This seems like it might be related to the change to limit kvm
to 384MB.  (sys/arch/i386/include/vmparam.h 1.44)
The default results in 6144 buffers using about 76MB of RAM.

-Andrew