in a lab of diskless machines, more or less identical (2003-2004 vintage, pentium 2.6GHz HTT, intel motherboard, ich5 chipset...), i see 5 out of 11 machine panicing on a bios16() call in sys/i386/i386/bios.c. After a bit of investigation i located the problem in the bios16() call for the 6th PNP device (on those boxes), the argument is PNP_GET_DEVNODE, and i am not sure what other relevant data are necessary to nail down the problem further. The system panics with a PC of 70:1023 (i think it is decimal, but i mightbe wrong). As a temporary workaround i put some code in the loop in pnpbios identify to break just before the offending call (the 6th after 5 successful ones) and can get to a fully working machine, but obviously would like a better cure. Any ideas ? maybe we are getting bogus info from the PnP descriptor and passing them to the bios16 call ? i tried to enable/disable PnP in the bios but made no difference; enable/disable the onboard audio also makes no difference. i tried kernels with/without 'device isa' but no difference either, the code still runs and panics. cheers luigi