i reversed the logic in eeh's patch and it no longer fails on my
   alpha.  i am awaiting my 32bit (shark) kernel to build so i can
   test that it works there as well before commiting (ah, it is linking,
   this should be soon).


i'm fairly sure this was it; the code seems right now anyway and
it works on both 64 and 32 bit architectures properly as far as i
can tell....


matt, please close the PR#9121 when you have tested that the
problem is gone for you...