I've seen a similar problem on a IPX when upgrading to a PowerUP chip
Solaris worked just fine but NetBSD paniced frequently.
It turned out that the cache chip was broken so i replaced it whith a chip
from another IPX that had a broken motherboard.

/Petter

On Sun, 18 Feb 2001, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:

> Hello, 
> 
> I was running NetBSD/sparc 1.5. On Friday I upgraded my IPX with a Wietek
> PowerUP chip. Immediately NetBSD stopped working correctly. On attempting
> the startx command I received either an illegal instruction or alignment
> fault panic. Loading Solaris 7 runs fine, if with the performance penalty
> that drove me to BSD in the first place... :'p.
> 
> In NetBSD I booted up to the console prompt (not running XDM), when I logged
> in as my user account and typed startx.  I got an illegal instruction panic
> or an alignment fault panic. I've made sure that the chip is seated properly
> and nothing else was different from a perfectly running system before. As
> root it fired up fine... right up until I tried to open the system console
> (which _is_ set to open automatically for my user account...hmm...). After
> that, so much for root. It's blew out on all attempts after that.  If I
> tried to boot from my Wasabi CDROM, I would still get a panic (of the
> aforementioned types) before it finishes loading the system install utility.
> 
> My understanding is that the PowerUP is completely binary compatible,
> however I was running Window Maker as a window manager. Could my local
> compile of that have left some odd code that the Weitek was barfing on?
> 
> I searched the archives somewhat (is there a search utility?) but didn't
> find anything on this.
> 
> Aside from ripping my hair out and sticking to Solaris, I don't see an
> answer. Thanks in advance to any help anyone can help.
> 
> William
>