I've got a dilemma on my hands.

I've just acquired a really nice last-model-of-the-line SPARCstation 20/71
at work (i.e., the one with the 4x CD-ROM like in the Ultras, and the newer
spiffy Sony 20E20 monitor with all the little pushbuttons on the front).

My officemate is coveting it with the notion of grabbing it to be a crash n'
burn Solaris 2.5.1 auto-install test mule (we have a bunch of 20/50's that
are stuck at Solaris 2.3, pending an open slot in the Galileo mission that
would allow us to get them up to 2.5.1).

Of course, *I'm* eyeing it to be a replacement for ol' "netbsd4me", my trusty
(crusty) SPARCstation 2 + Weitek.

But now it sounds like if I put NetBSD 1.2 on this SS20, I'll suddenly subject
myself to random instability and possible crashes, not to mention the loss
of audio capability (kinda important since I'm on the MBONE; and I'd really
like to get Real Audio 3.0 to work too (-: )

This may sound ridiculous, but my SS2 is as rock-solid as it comes.  Once in
a blue moon I get the infamous "panic: pmap_page_protect !PG_V" crashes,
but otherwise, the only problems I have are a pesky old sometimes-flaky sd3
disk and heavy Netscape usage tickling an apparent serious memory leak in
my homegrown X11R6 Xsun that causes it to bomb out on small realloc()'s.
While annoying, the latter is certainly a fair sight easier to live with than
some of the problems that I've seen on port-sparc and current-users of late!

Does Aaron's stop-gap pmap.c patch solve the random core dumps?  Is there
any hope of getting audio functionality on the SS20 going?  I would think
that if the SS2 audio works (which it most certainly does, I use it daily)
then there's gotta be a way to get the SS20 audio to work ... are the
Solaris 2.5.1 dbri(7D) and audio(7) man pages of no use?  Does anyone have
the 2 publications mentioned in dbri(7D)?  Namely

     AT&T Microelectronics data sheet for the T5900FC Sun Dual
     Basic Rate ISDN Interface.

     Crystal Semiconductor, Inc., data sheet for the CS4215 16-Bit,
     48 kHz, Multimedia Audio Codec; Publication number DS76PP5.

So - stable SS2 or volatile SS20?  What's the general consensus of the experts?

	- Greg

P.S. There was a thread about the Real Audio 3.0 Player sometime back;
     I just noticed that on my SunOS 4.1.4 system at home, it *also* gets the
     "Cannot open audio device" problem as well, even though the devices are
     owned by me!  An strace shows it trying to do 2 different sound ioctl()'s
     with fd's of (unsigned) -1, *before* either /dev/audio or /dev/audioctl
     are even open!  Duh ... (And the Solaris player reliably crashes my
     officemate's OpenWindows 3.3 Xsun with a SIGSEGV.  Thanks, Progressive
     Networks ... )