Since then, the silence has been deafening.

My assumption now is that this is not ever getting fixed. I'm certainly not
able to fix it. I'm not a even kernel programmer! I got far enough to
diagnose the cause just with the "add more printk's and boot it again"
technique. Hundreds of reboots trying to figure it out. I was a conscientious
bug-reporter, I thought.

I'm happy to help you fix it but I'm travelling at the moment and won't
have much time for a couple of weeks.

Cheers,
Ben.

I could pull the PCI card and be done with it. I never used those USB ports
anyway. But after all the suffering I went through to find this bug... the
crashing e2fsck's and consequent filesystem corruption... I hate the idea of
surrendering to it. There are possibly other affected users who I'd be
abandoning to suffer similarly in the future.

For the last week I've studied OpenFirmware as hard as I can. I read the spec
cover to cover. And the USB annex, and the PCI annex. But I'm still lost in
all the different address formats.

I took my best guess on how to handle this problem, and ran with it, ending
up with a 97-line Forth script, and that was just to get a virtual address,
not to actually do anything with it, and it used a hardcoded device path. But
it didn't work, all I got was an "invalid pointer" error. I made another
guess at something that wasn't documented anywhere (the fact that this stuff
is insufficiently documented is the one thing I can state with complete
confidence!) and out came a successful translation to a virtual address: 0.

If I'm the only one fighting this bug, the bug wins.