ok. I reproduced the kernel panic:
I imaged my sd card following these instructions:
http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7 ... /hackberryI used the hackberry.fex file from my earlier post to create a hackberry.bin (which is an acceptable name btw), and put that on the boot partition.
I connected the network via eithernet, so I could update to the latest greatest. After updating (pacman -Syyu) you have to copy uImage from /boot/uImage to the boot partition (anyone know if that's suppose to be manual?)
I installed wifi-menu, (which requires dialog and wpa_supplicant). When I ran it, kernel panic. This is due to the rtl8192cu driver.
I created a file in /etc/modprobe.d/wifi.conf with "blacklist rtl8192cu" (without quotes) in it to stop the broken driver from loading. Then wifi-menu worked (it loads the 8192cu driver instead).
I did have a bad SD card, so I had to run things multiple times (like wifi-menu would randomly fail). Let me know if you have any issues.