> What accelerator cards are known to work with MacBSD?

None.  Some have reported success with Daystar '030 boards, but I
presume only with the caches off.  It would be nice to have them
on, but I have higher priorities than adding code to the kernel
that I can't test, myself...  If someone knows where I can pick
up a PowerCache for under $100 or so, I might work on it...  ;-)

Faster is always nice...  I've been doing a gcc bootstrap and a
"make build" on my machine and the load has been between 2 and 5
for the last 48 hours:
w:
 8:15AM  up 1 day, 5 hrs, 3 users, load averages: 2.18, 2.22, 2.17
USER    TTY FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
briggs   p0 tiger.home.net   Sun01AM 10:33 stage2/cc1 /var/tmp/cc004167.i
briggs   p1 tiger.home.net    9:41PM     0 w
briggs   p2 tiger.home.net   11:21PM     0 -bash (bash)

pstat -s:
Device      512-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Type
/dev/sd0b        16384     4072    12312    25%    Interleaved
/dev/sd1b       215808    19176   196632     9%    Interleaved
Total           232192    23248   208944    10%

> I'm particularly interested in one of the Daystar '040 boards - can 
> MacBSD work with them?

Definitely not.  The 68040 code that does exist is way out of date.  I
am working on this, though, and it might be a possibility in a few
months.

> speed improvement does an accelerator card really give? - given that
> this means that all memory access have to be done at the clock speed of 
> the machine (16MHz in my case).

You still have the processor caches, so I think you get roughly a direct
improvment based on the clock speed, so a 33MHz card would double your
speed (just a guess-I have no numbers to back this claim...  ;-)

-allen

-- 
Allen Briggs - end killing - allen.briggs@bev.net ** MacBSD == NetBSD/mac68k **