I had exactly the same problem with sources from about a month ago or so. 
   A later sup seems to have fixed the problem for me.
   
   Has anyone successfully used a scsi disk on a Sparc ELC? We get a lot of 
   error messages as soon as we try to write to any of the disks. 

i've been running netbsd with between 1-4 scsi disks on an elc
for 18months, without a problem (and for 6-8 months prior to
that on an ss1+).

i had the empty fifo messages, but, they didn't affect
anything so i removed the printf.

.mrg.