>         Could either of you open a PR on this?
... sorry, just for today... i'm leaving (back on holydays :-) this evening...

>         If youo have a chance you might want to try netbooting a kernel
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sparc/snapshot/19990810/binary/kernel/
>         to see if the problem is still present...
As far as i can see, it seems (ALMOST) working. No more kernel panic... I
succeeded (after eliminating  .profile that apparently hung the system) in
netbooting netbsd -s. The bootphase (transferring and uncompressing,
i guess) is *much* slower than 1.4, and the running kernel (seems very slow)
produces a great amount of 

ie0: i82586_intr: (almost_a_thousend) spurious interrupts... 

I have just the 1.4 tree (old a.out executable format)...  Is this the reason
why executing many commands causes coredump?

Orazio Sottile