On Mon, 22 Dec 1997, Peter Koch wrote:

> 1. I use MacOS 7.5.5 to boot up. It is installed on a second disk.
>    NetBSD lives on the first disk. But the Booter (1.11.1) does not
>    come to the point, where the screen clears and the kernel starts,
>    but hangs. The only workaround is to hold down the Shift-key and
>    disable the Extensions completely.
>    Of course, this means, that i can't type "reboot" remotely.
>    Is there any way to get rid of MacOS completely? Boot NetBSD
>    directly? Has someone tried this?

Hi Pete,
Unfortunately, there's no way to avoid MacOS at this point....BUT you do
have some options. To avoid having to hold down the shift key, why don't
you just disable all the extensions anyway, using Extension Manager, or
whatever you prefer. Then you'll be beyond that tep. You could put the
booter in your startup items folder & then it'll auto-boot into NetBSD
(albeit slower than circumventing MacOS would be). I'd also suggest using
System 7.1, simply because it's smaller/faster than 7.5, but that's just
my opinion.

> 2. There and then, NetBSD shows a SCSI-error on the console. The
>    messages are quite frequent, if the machine accesses the disk
>    a lot. The messages vary, but the last line always reads:
> 	unexpected phase change.
>    Last evening, the machine crashed into the debugger after
>    such a message. It had an uptime of 7 days then.

Hmm, you've got me on this one...there's no aparent filesystem damager, is
there? Others are MUCH more versed than myself when it comes to SCSI
errors. Sorry.

> 3. NetBSD-1.3 is WAY slower on the Mac than on a Sun3. My IIvx
>    does have a 68030 at 33 MHz and 8 MB of memory, but my two
>    Sun3's (one 68030 at 24 MHz, one 68020 at 20 MHz) are MUCH
>    more zippier. Ok, they have 12 MB of memory, but does this
>    explain such a vast slowdown?
>    Or is the Mac hardware THAT BAD?
>    I can't believe my benchmark results... The Mac is slower,
>    even on CPU-intensive jobs?!?

The Mac hrdware isn't THAT BAD. There are many factors at play here.
First, yes, the RAM makes much diuufference. Have you ever used identical
Macs, 1 with VM turned on & 1 with it off? The amount ofd Swapping that a
Unix machine does is directly related to the amount of RAM (that & the
amount of open jobs). Also, how do the hard drive speeds compare between
the Mac & the Suns? I do know that the NetBSD hard drive drivers are quite
a bit slower than the MacOS drivers. We'll have to learn a bit more before
we can bring them up to speed. Try doing those benchmarks in single-user
mode. That way, you'll have far fewer processes running & you should be
swapping less.

HTH
Mike