> Fascinating!  That's thrice.  And at least two of them (possibly all three)
> I can nail down as the exact same thing!
> 
> During the configure stage of compiling the 1.4.2 package of devel/ffcall,
> it crashes immediately after:
> 
> checking for mmap declaration...
>          extern void* mmap (void*, size_t, int, int, int, off_t);

Interesting.  I also encountered this panic while running configure for
some program or other (I think it was octave or jacal - it's been
awhile).  I think you're onto something.

> This is on a stock hp 9000/433s running 1.4.2, custom kernel, 32 MB RAM, 64
> MB swap.
> 
> So, is there anything I can do (as a non-programmer) to help provide more
> details?

Do you have DDB in your kernel?  Can you get a backtrace (type 't' at the
DDB prompt)?

-Steve