Here's a possible patch #2... I believe the address pointed to by 
bio_data(bio) is not always contiguous over the length of bio->bi_size 
and was responsible for locking my machine up sometimes. My biggest 
reason for apprehension on believeing that I'm 100% correct on this is 
that there's still what appears to be a source of memory corruption in 
the patchlet modified nbd driver even after this patch. I know the 
driver is still not correctly notifying processes of the bytesize on 
open but the size reported appears to be big enough. Anyway, thanks for 
all of the feedback so far!!!!