I wrote:

> Ran into some other trouble along the way, and ended up building from a
> May 26th -current instead.  With that installed, the system keeps
> crashing on me -- segfault in kernel mode, with the pagedaemon as the
> current process.  Didn't do that with the cross-compiled system, so it's
> either something that changed between April 16th and May 26th, or it's
> an artifact of the system now running having been built on the VAX, as
> opposed to being cross-compiled.

It's to do with swap, it seems.  A simple way I can reproduce it is by
running bunzip2 on a large, bzip2-ed file.  I'll then watch, using
top(1), as free memory decreases while file buffering increases.  Once
free gets town between 500 and 300KB somewhere, the system crashes.  A
backtrace in the debugger included something like uvm_swapout (I didn't
write it down), so I figured it might be related to swap.  Did another
trial run without any swap space on line, and, sure enough, it doesn't
crash.

-tih
-- 
Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers.  --Pablo Picasso