I did some checking, and the newer memory allocation in SILO was not verifying that the initrd physical location was in the lower 32-bits address range. The kernel only accepts a 32-bit address range for initrd's. I re-added the check, so now SILO will put out a decent failure.
I suspect that in the long run, I really need to make it so that the initrd gets lower memory precendence over the kernel. The kernel itself can be loaded anywhere for sparc64, even in 64-bit address ranges. But for now, I am about to release SILO 1.4.6 to atleast make this less of a mystery on systems where it fails. -- Debian - http://www.debian.org/ Linux 1394 - http://www.linux1394.org/ Subversion - http://subversion.tigris.org/ WatchGuard - http://www.watchguard.com/