My swap file boot failure turned out – as I suspected – to be self-inflicted, as I had somehow managed to ‘unselect’ the ”support for paging of anonymous memory (swap)” option under General setup…

Once this was corrected, the 3.9.x kernel compiled – and booted – successfully..

Kernel 3.9.3 compiles the latest VMware (9.02) and NVIDIA (310.51 and ‘beta’ 319.17) drivers successfully..

# uname -a
Linux rg6830l 3.9.3 #1 SMP Mon May 20 10:50:55 PDT 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Robert Gadsdon.   May 20, 2013..