Are the via interrupts still in a state of flux?

I just built a new kernel from sources supped as of today (22-May), and 
I got some strange behaviour:

1st boot into single user, it got as far as the "what shell do you want" 
question, and when I pressed "return for sh" it twiddled the disk a 
couple of times and then just hung;  no shell prompt or anything, but if 
I typed on the keyboard, the characters echoed.  (Of course, with no 
shell to process the commands, echo is _all_ that happened!)

2nd boot, also into single user, got the shell loaded OK.  It even let me 
do a "rm /fastboot" command.  Of course, the file system was still 
mounted read-only, so rm complained.  And when I tried to "mount -u /" to 
get the root partition mounted read-write, the system hung, with the same 
symptoms as in the 1st boot.