Status of parport driver in 2.6.20.1

Hello,

I am running a 2.6.20.1 kernel on a C3600 workstation and want to hook 
up a printer to the parallel port. But modprobe'ing parport-pc or 
parport-serial gives me:

Kernel panic - not syncing: High Priority Machine Check (HPMC)

(This is using a serial line, no clue where the backtrace went...)

What is the current status of the parport driver on C3600 systems? Is 
this supposed to work? If so I am happy to provide a more thorough bug 
report.

Regards,
Julian