Anyway, in trying to rebuild the kernel to use 
   the pcvt console driver so that I could have virutal consoles, but I kept 
   running into errors...

I gather from your description that you were trying to use a kernel
named something other than `/netbsd'.  If this is the case, the
`errors' you mentioned are expected.

The problem here is finding the symbol table of the loaded kernel.
There is no general way to do this, except to load the symbol table
into core at boot time.  We already do that, but toss it if DDB is not
configured.  I'm considering instead marking it pageable and keeping
it around.