>> Since it caused major problems for me, I'm wondering why there is _ANY_
>> sound card support in the GENERIC kernel?

>Without the soundcard definition, PCMCIA devices won't work right at
>all. They'll try to allocate the sound card's IRQ.

>Furthermore, GENERIC is just that -- almost everything we support.

There have been other cases in the past of device probes that caused
problems (what was the driver that used to kill SMC NIC cards?)
anyway, perhaps there is a need for a MINIMAL config.  Ie. supports
nothing but the devices needed to install NetBSD.  Of course that's
still a lot of devices to probe for given the range of gear found on
i386 systems  but you definitley don't need lpt, and many other 
devices to get the system installed.

Of course adding a boot time config facility that allowed killer
probes to be skipped would also solve the problem.

--sjg