In message <20050409175523.28304.qmail@rfhpc8319.fh-regensburg.de>, Hubert Feyr
er writes:
>My advice to you: Try replacing the RAM.

This may help, but... It is ECC memory.

More interestingly, consider the following:
* Machine prints some error message (I can't see it before it scrolls) about
allocation before even printing the kernel ID string.
* dmesg won't run.
* If I use options EXTMEM and a slightly conservative value, everything works
perfectly.

My current theory is that the boot loader is getting the available memory
wrong, and stepping on some chunk of memory the motherboard stole for one
of the onboard items, probably the SCSI controller.

-s