While /M38 is known to fail when accessing SCSI in DMA mode, normally
the autoconfig only polls, and it worked for me, that is, I could boot
into multiuser, all diskless of course.

What you see looks like a BIIIG misunderstanding between disk and
ncr53c80 or driver.... I guess your disk is the culprit, but the
driver probably should handle this condition more nicely.

I guess in the long term, some effort must be made to identify the
most stable 53C80 driver in NetBSD and use that (per bus-space-xxx,
not per source copy) for port-vax.

Regards,
	Ignatios