> I tried to boot an i386 system with 1024 MB of memory from the
> snap-19981207 kernel. It crashed severely. It loads the kernel, prints
> the Berkeley banner, and then immediately crashes before attempting to
> do anything more. No CPU type, no memory count, no i/f probing, just
> crash. The message was:
>   ELF symbol table not valid.
>   page fault trap.
>   _uvm_pageboot_alloc+0x9c

From=20what I can see, this is all happening inside
uvm_pageboot_alloc at the place where pmap_kenter_pa is expanded
as inline code from pmap.new.h:

__inline static void pmap_kenter_pa(va, pa, prot)

vaddr_t va;
paddr_t pa;
vm_prot_t prot;

{
  pt_entry_t *pte, opte;

  pte =3D vtopte(va);
  opte =3D *pte;

It is falling on it's face in the last of the statements above,
i.e. where it's accessing *pte.

Why this is failing I have absolutely no idea; the UVM and
PMAP_NEW subsystems are more or less black magic to myself...

If the kernel did drop you to DDB the output of "trace" (showing
the stack backtrace) and "show regs" would probably be
illuminating for the enlightened (among which I am not...).


- H=E5vard