In 2.5.70 bk latest, I'm getting a panic related to character device
initialisation.  The problem seems to be that the new sysfs entries for
character devices require that everything now have a properly
initialised parent.  However, the character subsystem is set up in
drivers/char/mem.c as

__initcall(chr_dev_init);

However, __initcall() is the same priority as module_init(), so whether
character devices are initialised before their required subsystem
depends purely on link ordering (on parisc, we initialise devices/parisc
before everything else, so it is panicing reliably with this).

I think the fix is to convert the __initcall to subsys_initcall (patch
attached).  The patch allows parisc to boot properly now.

James